Nothing interesting since 2011?

A Lost World? Atlantis-Like Landscape Discovered

Wynne Parry

http://www.livescience.com/14974-geologists-remains-landscape-rose-north-atlantic-ocean-56-million-years-sinking.html

Date: 10 July 2011 Time: 01:01 PM ET

This image of the ancient buried landscape discovered deep beneath the sediment of the North Atlantic Ocean was made using sound waves bounced off different rock layers. An ancient meandering riverbed is visible.
CREDIT: R A Hartley et al.

View full size image


Buried deep beneath the sediment of the North Atlantic Ocean lies an ancient, lost landscape with furrows cut by rivers and peaks that once belonged to mountains. Geologists recently discovered this roughly 56-million-year-old landscape using data gathered for oil companies.

"It looks for all the world like a map of a bit of a country onshore," said Nicky White, the senior researcher. "It is like an ancient fossil landscape preserved 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the seabed."

So far, the data have revealed a landscape about 3,861 square miles (10,000 square km) west of the Orkney-Shetland Islands that stretched above sea level by almost as much as 0.6 miles (1 km). White and colleagues suspect it is part of a larger region that merged with what is now Scotland and may have extended toward Norway in a hot, prehuman world.





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History beneath the seafloor

The discovery emerged from data collected by a seismic contracting company using an advanced echo-sounding technique. High pressured air is released from metal cylinders, producing sound waves that travel to the ocean floor and beneath it, through layers of sediment. Every time these sound waves encounter a change in the material through which they are traveling, say, from mudstone to sandstone, an echo bounces back. Microphones trailing behind the ship on cables record these echoes, and the information they contain can be used to construct three-dimensional images of the sedimentary rock below, explained White, a geologist at the University of Cambridge in Britain.

The team, led by Ross Hartley, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, found a wrinkly layer 1.2 miles (2 km) beneath the seafloor — evidence of the buried landscape, reminiscent of the mythical lost Atlantis.

The researchers traced eight major rivers, and core samples, taken from the rock beneath the ocean floor, revealed pollen and coal, evidence of land-dwelling life. But above and below these deposits, they found evidence of a marine environment, including tiny fossils, indicating the land rose above the sea and then subsided — "like a terrestrial sandwich with marine bread," White said.

The burning scientific question, according to White, is what made this landscape rise up, then subside within 2.5 million years? "From a geological perspective, that is a very short period of time," he said.

The giant hot ripple

He and colleagues have a theory pointing to an upwelling of material through the Earth's mantle beneath the North Atlantic Ocean called the Icelandic Plume. (The plume is centered under Iceland.)

The plume works like a pipe carrying hot magma from deep within the Earth to right below the surface, where it spreads out like a giant mushroom, according to White. Sometimes the material is unusually hot, and it spreads out in a giant hot ripple.

The researchers believe that such a giant hot ripple pushed the lost landscape above the North Atlantic, then as the ripple passed, the land fell back beneath the ocean.

This theory is supported by other new research showing that the chemical composition of rocks in the V-shaped ridges on the ocean floor around Iceland contains a record of hot magma surges like this one. Although this study, led by Heather Poore, also one of White's students, looked back only about 30 million years, White said he is hopeful ongoing research will pinpoint an older ridge that recorded this particular hot ripple.

Because similar processes have occurred elsewhere on the planet, there are likely many other lost landscapes like this one. Since this study was completed, the researchers have found two more recent, but less spectacular, submerged landscapes above the first one, White said.

Both studies appear today (July 10) in the journal Nature Geoscience.

You can follow LiveScience writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.



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UFOs in FBI’s Vault

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20110411/od_yblog_upshot/ufos-in-fbis-vault

UFOs in FBI’s Vault
By Mike Krumboltz

By Mike Krumboltz mike Krumboltz – 2 hrs 8 mins ago

The truth is out there. And by "truth," we mean a controversial (and official) 1950s FBI memo that alleges aliens did in fact land in New Mexico which has just been republished on the agency's website.

Not surprisingly, the news sparked a furious amount of activity on the web. Online lookups for "ufo fbi files" soared, as did related searches on "ufo pictures" and "ufo fbi coverup." But don't get too excited--this isn't the first time this controversial memo has circulated, and its claims are far from verified.

The memo was published on "The Vault," a newly launched FBI blog that showcases documents from the Bureau's past for history buffs to peruse. It was written by Guy Hottel, the special agent in charge of the Washington field office in 1950, and was addressed to the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. The letter's content is amazing, as is the rather casual tone in which it's delivered.

An investigator for the Air Forces stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic

Michael Luckman, director of the New York Center for Extraterrestrial Research, calls these documents a step toward full disclosure. But the story isn't nearly as good upon closer examination. The memo is a Bureau account of an informant, whose name has been blacked out, telling the agency about a UFO sighting. And Guy Hottel--who penned the memo--was the head of the Washington, D.C., not the New Mexico, field office. Whether or not that informant was telling the truth is something we'll probably never know. According to the Bureau, the tip was never followed up on.

CBS News points out that the memo is not exactly news. "The so-called 'Hottel memo'--which the agency never corroborated--has been publicly available for years." The Vault's re-posting of the famous document has put its claims back on the public's radar.

The International Business Times says the memo is but one piece of a larger alien hoax. It could be argued that, if their account is correct, that the real conspiracy may be in trying to convince people that there actually is a conspiracy.

Confirmed alien sightings isn't the only wild FBI conspiracy theory to be resurrected via the FBI's new blog. Files regarding Hitler's possible escape from Germany at the end of World War II were also posted on The Vault. According to the reports, various informants reported seeing the infamous Nazi all over the world in the years following his suicide. Of course, those turned out to be not true.

(Hottel memo: The Vault/FBI)

Anti-bacterial textiles to save lives

http://israel21c.org/201009028286/technology/anti-bacterial-textiles-to-save-lives


By Abigail Klein Leichman
September 02, 2010


The same bacteria that make your sweaty socks smell are responsible for some 1.7 million hospital-associated infections in the US alone. An Israeli antibacterial fabric may offer a solution.
Bacteria
In hospitals, fabric bred bacteria gain a foothold through wounds or catheters.

What makes sweaty socks smell? It's not the moisture; it's the bacteria that grow in the damp fabric. If you could alter or banish those microbes, you could wear sweaty socks for a week without offending anyone.

Israeli Prof. Aharon Gedanken's success with antibacterial socks, a product intended for Israeli soldiers that never made it to market, may hold the key to addressing what is actually a global healthcare concern.

The fact is, fabric-bred bacteria aren't just a smelly problem. They are also responsible for hospital-acquired infections affecting nearly nine percent of patients in both developed and resource-poor countries, according to the World Health Organization. That translates to some 1.7 million hospital-associated infections in the United States - causing or contributing to 99,000 deaths each year - and 25,000 infection-related deaths in European hospitals. Most often, the bacteria gain a foothold through wounds or foreign bodies such as catheters.

Locking-in the antibacterial nanoparticles

A multinational consortium headed by Gedanken recently won a 12 million-euro grant from the European Union (EU) for manufacturing machines in Europe that will more quickly roll out fabric impregnated with zinc oxide nanoparticles to make antibacterial hospital sheets, curtains, gowns, towels - anything that is made of textiles for hospital use.

"This is a novelty, and we are negotiating with some big companies," says Gedanken, director of the Kanbar Laboratory for Nanomaterials at the Bar-Ilan University Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA) Gedanken created an innovative chemical process that reduces zinc oxide, a gentle but effective natural substance often used to combat diaper rash, into microscopic nanoparticles.

He is coordinating a four-year consortium of 17 textile manufacturers, universities, and government agencies in England, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Bulgaria and Poland working to perfect a technique to coat and mass produce antibacterial fabric.

"Many others have tried to coat textiles with antibacterial materials, but after washing, everything is removed," Gedanken explains to ISRAEL21c. "Our technique deposits the nanoparticles in such a way that you can wash the textiles in a hospital washing machine in keeping with regulations about temperature and number of cycles, and they still retain the particles."

Two machines are now under construction, one in France to install in Italy, and one in Russia to install in Romania. According to the terms of the EU grant, all partners meet periodically to discuss their progress and plan the next steps.

Cures for viruses, fungi and acne

"We started with a patent for the coating process," says Gedanken, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry and did post-doctoral work at the University of Southern California. "Ultrasonic waves go through the [zinc oxide] solution, and the bubbles created in the liquid collapse and form microjets that move at very high speed. These microjets take the newly created nanoparticles and swirl them onto the fabric at such a high speed that they are embedded so strongly you cannot remove them by washing. I guarantee that nanoparticles will not get into the waste water."

Tests performed using a small prototype machine made by Gedanken show that the nanoparticles remain embedded after 70 cycles of washing in a hospital washer.

"A billion-dollar US corporation is interested in our project," he reveals: "Over the years, they had about 20 [inventors] claiming to have a material that would kill bacteria and not wash out, but they all failed the test. This company is now examining our samples."

Gedanken, a 1965 graduate of Bar-Ilan, has published more than 550 scientific papers, was awarded a Minerva Fellowship, and was a visiting scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories for several years during the 1980s and at the US National Institutes of Health in the summers of 1989, 1990, and 1991. In 2009, he won the Edwards Prize of the Israel Vacuum Society for excellence in scientific research.

His 30-person laboratory at BINA has a number of grant-funded projects underway, ranging from novel ways to produce biodiesel to new treatments for acne. His research in nanoparticles also includes identifying anti-viral and anti-fungal substances.

Investor Relations Professional (IRP) Members should have a disclaimer symbol. Do they all? How many are not registered.

This might turn into an event as great as immigation of illegal's.

How many investor relation professionals are running wild on IHUB?

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/IRP_Members.aspx?method=b



I find this very interesting.

Oil-eating Israeli bacteria for BP spill

A natural "bioremediation" technique developed by biologists at an Israeli university may hold the key to the final, difficult steps of the billion dollar oil spill cleanup in the wake of the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Professors Eugene Rosenberg and Eliora Ron from Tel Aviv University (TAU) use naturally occurring oil-munching bacteria, grown at the TAU lab, to clean hard-to-reach oil pockets that are produced when oil mixes with sand and organic matter on beaches and forms a thin layer on precious waterways.

"It's worked to clean up an oil spill on the coast of Haifa," Ron reports, "so we've got evidence it could work in Florida, too."

The scientists identified a naturally occurring variety of sea-borne bacteria that digests oil. Following decades of research, they developed a solution that could clean up the residual oil that can't be removed by mechanical means.

Their solution addresses the small percentage of oil left behind that sits under rocks and forms a thin film on the water after the surface pools have been sucked up and the oil has been contained. Their bacterial solution can remove this residual oil and protect the sea's wildlife.

"Even when cleanup crews reduce the amount of oil at sea, there will probably be enough left behind to kill birds and wildlife," says Ron, adding that at this level of oil removal, the only solution is bioremediation - using nature itself to do the final cleanup.

http://www.israel21c.org/201008058241/briefs/oil-eating-israeli-bacteria-for-bp-spill

Twisting a plastic bottle in the ocean can attract sharks!

Watch: http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/shark-week-blood-noise-and-sharks.html

Dave Gold Turns 99 Cents Into Big Bucks

For better readability plus a couple of pictures, follow the below link to read this article... I've often dreamed of running a business this way - going against the grain can create a competitive advantage and a unique business identity... Aiming4.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=540440&obref=outbrain&p=3


By SCOTT S. SMITH, FOR INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 07/15/2010 05:00 PM ET

Dave Gold was amazed.
Whenever he put a bottle of wine on sale for 99 cents at his two L.A. liquor stores, they sold better than when the price was 98 or 89 cents.
After 20 years of witnessing this phenomenon, Gold fantasized about opening a store that would sell goods only at that magic price.
One day in 1982 while driving with a friend, he started up yet again about his dream.
The friend exploded: "I'm sick and tired of you talking about it! Look, there's a store for rent right now. Why don't you grab it?"
He forced Gold to pull over. Gold signed a lease agreement that day.
"Usually, when you have a good idea, you see someone else beat you to it within six months," Gold, 77, told IBD. "I realized it was way past time to finally take action."
Did he ever. Today there are 276 of his 99 Cents Only Stores (NDN), which raked in $1.36 billion in sales for fiscal 2010 while profit skyrocketed from $8.5 million to $60.4 million in just one year.
The company, which has no debt, per Gold's philosophy, went public in 1996 and surged 800% in its first seven years after the IPO.
Gold started working at his parents' fruit stand in Cleveland when he was in grade school.
After moving to Los Angeles, he dropped out of college and he and his wife took over the liquor stores. He retired at 50 before launching the deep-discount chain.
Expensive Trouble In 1982
Inflation had hit 10% the year before. How could he keep his prices under a buck? Everyone told Gold that he certainly shouldn't put the price in the name of his store, in case he had to raise it.
As always, he went his own way — just as he drove hybrid cars before the public had heard of them.
Within six months of opening 99 Cents, he had proved the concept viable. The skeptics were now regular customers.
"Others do things because that's how they've always been done in an industry," said Eric Schiffer, Gold's son-in-law, who became CEO in 2005 as Gold shifted over to chairman. "Dave doesn't care what everyone else does. He looks at everything with a fresh perceptive."
One way he innovated, Schiffer says, was by designing stores as attractive as the slickest supermarkets. Gold stocked mostly brand-name merchandise when dollar stores were perceived as grungy outlets with out-of-date and flawed products (a photo of one of his colorful places is in a collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art).
"We can't afford rejects," Gold said. "Value matters more than price to customers, and we have to keep the value high."
His role model is Sam Walton. Gold's copy of the Wal-Mart (WMT) founder's autobiography is heavily underlined.
Another key to success has been that 95% of 99 Cents Only Stores' stock comes directly from manufacturers. Gold has made the process easy for vendors.
"We pay our suppliers before anyone else does, we'll take deliveries even when they're a couple of hours late, and we're probably the only company that has never canceled a purchase order," Gold said. "If we accidentally get a few extra cases, we tell them, and if we're short a case, we don't mention it. It's not just because we want to be honest; it's a very practical policy."
The Gold Rules
Instead of vendors having to get new products approved by buying committees, Gold empowers his buyers to make decisions and pays them twice the industry average because "they're not just placing reorders; they're building relationships that allow us to be ones our vendors call when they're overstocked."
His company has leveraged these links into a wholesale division that sells to other bargain stores.
"Treating others the way you want to be treated is a core value Dave has instilled in us, and you'd be surprised at how many executives have trouble with that," Schiffer said. "Anyone who doesn't live our values won't last here."
The CEO says Gold figures employees should run the business like they'd run their own households, "and you can apply a lot of lessons from there — you don't leave the lights on, you pick up the trash."
Number 9, Number 9
Employees ("99ers") get a top benefits package. And most managers and executives come from in-house, so the 12,000-member work force is loyal to the hilt, Schiffer says.
Since the company doesn't use an ad agency, workers participate in "nine sense," the humor that pervades public relations — from signage about refunds for those who aren't "99.99% delighted" to store grand openings, where a 99-year-old man will give away nine TVs for 99 cents to the first nine customers.
It's an extension of Gold, who peppers his business talk with jokes.
"Here, the best ideas, humorous or serious, win on merit, no matter who generates them," Schiffer said.
Gold says the company's philosophy of treating everyone well extends to customers, "who are really the CEOs. Without them you have nothing, so you have to look at the stores the way they do."
To serve them better, his stores open 15 minutes before the posted opening and stay open 15 minutes after the official closing time.
"We've all been frustrated by the need to get somewhere and workers won't open the doors a few minutes early," Schiffer said.
The good will at all levels translates into a gross profit of 40%, with new stores turning a profit within a year of launch, according to 99 Cents Only Stores.
Customers tend to come every week because half of each store's stock has brand-name essentials.
Gold did make a small concession to price pressure after 26 years of offering nothing over 99 cents. In 2008 he began letting some products be sold at 99.99 cents.
The recent recession was to the company's advantage, bringing in customers who might otherwise have never thought of shopping at 99 Cents Only.
Then again, the rich discovered it long ago. The store nearest Beverly Hills is the chain's highest-grossing at $11 million annually, and the parking lot is often full of luxury cars.
"Rich people love bargains," Gold said. "That's how they got rich."
He doubts that the newest customers will stop shopping at his stores if the economy keeps recovering, pointing to the lifelong psychological impact of the Great Depression.
Smart Money
He probably knows what he's talking about. So well did he do before the company went public, he spent $34 million of his own money to buy out an acquisition that didn't perform as expected and just closed it. Yet he hardly seems like a tycoon; he's laid back, in rumpled clothes and having fun.
Dave Gold simply loves to buck conventional wisdom.

That is fascinating Dubi... I shared it with my wife who enjoys watching and listening to birds.

It's a shame those birds ever had to hear a chainsaw, let along hear it often enough to be able to mimic it.

I have relatives in West Virginia... there are many many coal mine tunnels there and sinkholes on a small scale are not an uncommon occurrence... but certainly nothing like the Guatemala one though.

That story reflect a couple of my philosophies...

Truth is stranger than fiction...

and you just never can predict or sometimes believe what people will do... both good and bad.

It's a crazy world out there!

Sure is fearful, if you get to thinking deeply about it.

TechKim - the first time I saw that photo - like many others I'm sure, I thought it was photo-shopped.

Truly unbelievable.

David Attenborough presents the amazing lyre bird, which mimics the calls of other birds - and chainsaws and camera shutters - in this video clip from The Life of Birds. This clever creature is one of the most impressive and funny in nature, with unbelievable sounds to match the beautiful pictures. From the BBC.

DA: Pennsylvania woman may keep corpses if she builds crypt
Published: Tuesday, July 06, 2010, 4:46 PM Updated: Tuesday, July 06, 2010, 5:42 PM
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/07/da_pennsylvania_woman_may_keep.html


Jean Stevens, 91, holds a photograph from the 1940s of herself and her late husband, James, outside her home in Wyalusing, Pa. Authorities say Stevens stored the bodies of her husband, who died in 1999, and her twin, who died in October 2009, on her property. The district attorney is offering to release the bodies to her if she builds a crypt.
----------------------------------------------------------------

WYALUSING, Pa. — A 91-year-old woman found living with the corpses of her husband and twin sister will be allowed to keep them if she installs a mausoleum or crypt, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

Jean Stevens has indicated through her attorney that she plans to build an aboveground vault on her property to store the bodies of James Stevens and June Stevens, according to Bradford County District Attorney Daniel Barrett. “If she does that, the bodies will be released for that purpose,” he said. “Otherwise they will be re-interred.”

Stevens’ attorney, Leslie Wizelman, did not immediately return phone messages left at her office. Stevens previously told The Associated Press that she kept the embalmed remains of her loved ones because she wanted to be able to see them and talk to them. She also said she’s claustrophobic and couldn’t stand the thought of their bodies in caskets in the ground.

State police have been investigating the bizarre case since the corpses were discovered in mid-June. Authorities found the body of James Stevens on a couch in the detached garage and the body of June Stevens on a couch in a spare room off the bedroom.

Stevens had them dug up shortly after they died — James in 1999 and June in October — and tended to their remains at her rural property outside the northern Pennsylvania town of Wyalusing.

Barrett said a decision on charges could be made as early as Friday, after he meets with investigators. He said authorities are looking into several possible violations, including misdemeanor abuse of a corpse. He also cited possible summary violations of the state health code, which regulates how bodies must be disinterred.

“There were some things done here that were not lawful,” he said.

Police haven’t said who retrieved the bodies.
============================================================
read more:
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/07/macabre_case_pennsylvania_kept.html

Major sinkhole in Guatemala City.



The story
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37418183/ns/weather/

That's very interesting TechKim, thanks... I always keep an open mind about such things - the human body and spirit have amazing capabilities.

It's pretty tough to imagine human survival without water though!

70 years without eating? 'Starving yogi' says it's true
Posted on Monday, May 10, 2010 7:00 PM PT
By Brian Alexander
http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/05/10/2299480.aspx
Prahlad Jani, an 82-year-old Indian yogi, is making headlines by claims that for the past 70 years he has had nothing -- not one calorie -- to eat and not one drop of liquid to drink. To test his claims, Indian military doctors put him under round-the-clock observation during a two-week hospital stay that ended last week, news reports say. During that time he didn’t ingest any food or water – and remained perfectly healthy, the researchers said.

But that’s simply impossible, said Dr. Michael Van Rooyen an emergency physician at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an associate professor at the medical school, and the director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative – which focuses on aid to displaced populations who lack food and water.

Van Rooyen says that depending on climate conditions like temperature and humidity, a human could survive five or six days without water, maybe a day or two longer in extraordinary circumstances. We can go much longer without food – even up to three months if that person is taking liquids fortified with vitamins and electrolytes.

Bobby Sands, an Irish Republican convicted of firearms possession and imprisoned by the British, died in 1981 on the 66th day of his hunger strike. Gandhi was also known to go long stretches without food, including a 21-day hunger strike in 1932.


Sterling Hospitals / AFP - Getty Images file
Prahlad Jani was studied for two weeks.

Jani, dubbed "the starving yogi" by some, did have limited contact with water while gargling and periodically bathing, reported the news wire service AFP. While researchers said they measured what he spit out, Van Rooyen said he's clearly getting fluid somehow.

"You can hold a lot of water in those yogi beards. A sneaky yogi for certain," he said. "He MUST take in water. The human body cannot survive without it." The effects of food and water deprivation are profound, Van Rooyen explained. “Ultimately, instead of metabolizing sugar and glycogen [the body’s energy sources] you start to metabolize fat and then cause muscle breakdown. Without food, your body chemistry changes. Profoundly malnourished people autodigest, they consume their own body’s resources. You get liver failure, tachycardia, heart strain. You fall apart.”

The yogi, though, would already be dead from lack of hydration. If he really went without any liquids at all, his cardiovascular system would have collapsed. “You lose about a liter or two of water per day just by breathing,” Van Rooyen said. You don’t have to sweat, which the yogi claims he never does. That water loss results in thicker blood and a drop in blood pressure.

“You go from being a grape to a raisin,” Van Rooyen said and if you didn’t have a heart attack first, you’d die of kidney failure.

Comments
What this ogi is doing has been done by yogi's for millenia. It is an amazing feat in that it is real and it took this particular man an almost inconcievable of discipline to achieve. Our physicists are just beginning to skim the finest surface of understanding of our human potential and while going without food for so long may not seem to serve a purpose - it is one of many ways to make the journey inward that we all must make eventually. We are all connected and when one achieves the level of discipline and inward seeking that this man has - it is for all of us.
John Patton (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:27 PM)

My Bull $hit meter is pinging in the red zone on this one
us2insanmarcos@yahoo.com (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:27 PM)

What western medicine fails to recognize is that the human body has many secrets and capacities that few have explored. The human organism is not merely mechanical. And the capacity of the universe to surprise us with the unexpected should make modern doctors be more humble. For example: doctors dismissed germ theory as bunk just a 150 years ago. "Wash my hands? What rubbish." Be open minded and humble you masters of medicine and the knife!!
Chuck Henderson (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:28 PM)

Mabye theres a chees burger in that beard and a bottle of water under his chin?
Mark Seattle WA (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:29 PM)

This can be a real event where a person gains his energy from other sources which are not nutritional in the usual sense. A term sometimes used is "breathers" getting energy from the prana in the environment.
F, Jackson, MS (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:30 PM)

"sneaky yogi" lol
C Norris, AZ (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:31 PM)

Just another "breathairian... one who survives only by breathing air. This myth has been around a long time. Just wait long enough, and you'll see them sneaking in a twinky.
R W Arnold (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:31 PM)

We are spiritual being just having human experience..... and for many yogis that can transcend this dimension and exist in the 4th dimension which is beyond man's common understand.

It not just about logic or reality because logic and reality in the 4th dimension is the illusion.

It may truly be an example of mind over matter. These are things that enligtened being have been doing since the beginning of time...Jesus stated,"You will do things even greater than I".

Study Quantum Physics......

Dr. Elon Bomani
www.elonbomani.com
Dr. Elon Bomani, Missouri City, Tx. (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:32 PM)

Science, as a belief system

"But that’s simply impossible, said Dr. Michael Van Rooyen"

Evidence not withstanding.

Steve, Middletown, NY (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:38 PM)

Wow, the lengths people will go to get some attention. I suppose Jani has some higher calling so that's why he is depriving himself of food and drink. I couldn't or wouldn't want to go the weekend.
Jay F. (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:40 PM)

Simply ridiculous.
C.C. Upstate, NY (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:41 PM)

demons lie
don wall monroe la (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:42 PM)

India is full of phony magicians. What I want to know is this: What is his relationship to the "researchers" and why are they knowingly publicizing a fraud?
Eric, USA (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:42 PM)

What Dr. Michael Van Rooyen says is based on the science as we know it now. But the science today is like a monkey trying to reach the moon and not getting beyond the top of the trees.

I have personally witnessed the things in India that science CAN'T explain. I, thinking that I know it all based on science, challenged the validity of these phenomena and came out surrendering.

Dr. Van Rooyen knows some science based on physical laws of nature, but has no idea of the subtle laws of nature. He and the humanity has a long way to go before science and religion meet at one point.
Shanker (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:43 PM)

Is he drinking his own urine?
Daniel, Carthage, MS (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:43 PM)

What Dr. Michael Van Rooyen says is based on the science as we know it now. But the science today is like a monkey trying to reach the moon and not getting beyond the top of the trees.

I have personally witnessed the things in India that science CAN'T explain. I, thinking that I know it all based on science, challenged the validity of these phenomena and came out surrendering.

Dr. Van Rooyen knows some science based on physical laws of nature, but has no idea of the subtle laws of nature. He and the humanity has a long way to go before science and religion meet at one point.
Shanker (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:44 PM)

Does the Yogi urinate? When heated, does he sweat? Are there feces in his intestinal tract? If nobody in the two weeks found or checked for any of the above (and more), they were all in on the hoax in some way.
Barry (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:45 PM)

Is this the same Yogi that came up with the rope trick, or the milk that came from the elephants trunk?
Paul, Milwaukee, WI (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:49 PM)

This is nothing but bullshit. These so called 'yogis' are nothing but fraudsters.
John Doe, Seattle, Wash (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:49 PM)

I guess he's never taken a "crap or a piss" either? Huh? Why didn't they throw that in there?
Hey! Maybe he can get on "Dancing with the Stars"!!!!!!!!
raymond banner san antonio tx (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:52 PM)

Claimed he hasn’t eaten in 70 years? Was observed for 2 weeks without ingesting anything? If this was the first century A.D. he’d be hailed as God on earth and an entire religion would ensue that would still be in practice today, people would pray to and baptize their offspring in his name… However because this is 2010 and we have science we understand this for what it is, a hoax. Indeed religions, all religions, are truly that stupidly based.
Vansonboy, Kapolei HI (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:54 PM)

wierd
Gentle So Temple City, CA (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:55 PM)

Let's dissect him. Or at least sequence his genome.
Charlie, Mpls (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:57 PM)

He must be the ideal dinner guest. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The world would be a much easier place to live in if hucksters like this were not roaming around.
David Corby (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:57 PM)

Its completely impossible, unless that dude is some sort or alien, or ghost.
mike mcgill, los angeles (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:58 PM)

makes me thirsty just thinking about this
Dave N, maryland (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:59 PM)

This could be an incredible discovery- is there another way to validate his claims?
Jennifer McFarlane, Tampa Bay, FLA. (Monday, May 10, 2010 8:59 PM)

** Its another way to make a no body a super star... SCAM
Tony - outside Chicago (Monday, May 10, 2010 9:00 PM)

Mr. Van Rooyen, where as you deal with the limited body and limited subject, True Yogis on the other hand deal with The Unlimited and they are NOT ordinarily touched by the limited [knowledge, cause and hence effects]. To 'Know' one ought to make observations, perhaps by locking the Yogi up [with his permission, otherwise you could become 'raisin' !]. Of course, you need to know to discern wheat from its chaffe. 70 years is nothing compared to other instances found in the Hindu Scriptures. The name Prahlad may have connection to the Puranic Prahlad, one of the greatest devotee of Lord Vishnu.
TuriaState, Aurora, IL (Monday, May 10, 2010 9:01 PM)

Total BS.......send the discovery channel to investigate. What a load of crap.....come on look at this guy!
Jason, Fremont, CA (Monday, May 10, 2010 9:01 PM)

Bullshit...
Suresh AMATYA, New York, New York (Monday, May 10, 2010 9:02 PM)

So certainly someone was smart enough to weigh him before and after this 2 week period. Did he lose weight?
Marcia Jacobs Colorado Springs Co (Monday, May 10, 2010 9:04 PM)

I don't know why I clicked on this article, nor why MSNBC would be reporting on it. I'm a biomedical scientist and this is absolutely absurd.
WCW, Calhoun, GA (Monday, May 10, 2010 9:07 PM)

its true. i havent had food or water for 17 years and i feel fine. i just go out of my body and over to pizza hut, then come back into my body and thats the truth.
john doe, las vegas, nv (Monday, May 10, 2010 9:09 PM)

That is very impressive to go without food or water for 70 years straight.
Sabrina Jacob, Harrisonburg, Virginia (Monday, May 10, 2010 9:12 PM)

obviously this scientist physician observer, Dr. Van Rooyen, is a disgrace to his profession because he is denying the basic scientific rule of observation--there are breatherators--my term may be wrong--who can subsist without eating or drinking--the good doctor should do thorough research and check it out--
jonnybee, vegas baby (Monday, May 10, 2010 9:16 PM)




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Growing Fresh Air with 8 Powerful Plants

Janelle Sorensen
Wednesday, December 23, 2009

http://healthychild.org/blog/comments/growing_fresh_air_with_8_powerful_plants/

What do you do when you become allergic to the air? When your lungs begin to shut down because the air is too contaminated? Kamal Meattle suffered from this fate and guess what his solution was? Grow new air. Based on years of NASA studies, other scientific research, and 15 years of his own testing, Meattle discovered that three common houseplants, used strategically throughout a home, could vastly improve the indoor air quality.

Here's the breakdown:

Areca Palm is "The Living Room Plant" - This plant is a daytime oxygen factory and Meattle recommends having 4 shoulder height plants per person.

Mother-in-Law's Tongue is "The Bedroom Plant" - This plant is an evening oxygen factory and Meattle recommends having 6-8 waist-high plants per person.

Money Plant is "The Specialist Plant" - This plant is the filter that removes formaldehyde and other volatile organic chemicals from the air.

If maintained appropriately, Meattle claims you could live inside a bottle with a cap on top and these three plants would generate all the fresh air you need.

Not looking to live in a bottle? These plants will certainly still improve your indoor air quality (even if you don't have quite so many). And, if you're not satisfied with just three options, other new research has identified five "super ornamentals" that demonstrated high effectiveness of contaminant removal.

These include the purple waffle plant (Hemigraphis alternataa), English ivy (Hedera Helix), variegated wax plant (Hoya cornosa), Asparagus fern (Asparagus densiflorus) and the Purple heart plant (Tradescantia pallida).

Of the 28 plants tested, these five were effective at reducing levels of a number of common household VOCs, including benzene, toluene, octane, alpha-pinene and TCE. The work, funded by the University of Georgia's Agricultural Experiment Stations, was published in the August 2009 issue of HortScience.

Ready to grow your own fresh air? NASA studies recommend that you use one good-sized houseplant in a 6 to 8-inch diameter container for every 100 square feet of your home. Though, additional research is being done to identify exactly how many of each type of species is necessary for remediation (as in Meattle's work). You should also be sure to keep the foliage clean and dust free (so the leaves can do their job). And, keep the top of soil clean and free of debris, as in some cases, that's where the bulk of the filtering is taking place.

The healthier your plants, the more vigorously they'll grow, and the better they'll clean the air for you.


Read more: http://healthychild.org/blog/comments/growing_fresh_air_with_8_powerful_plants/#ixzz0lVMzuXOV

Long read, but fascinating and amazing…

Well stated and so true.

Id

Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief

Long read, but fascinating and amazing, use the link to see some pics that go with the story... Aiming4.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/03/ff_masterthief_blanchard/all/1

The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.

A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just another twentysomething on vacation with his wife and her wealthy father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of Versailles, his father-in-law’s VIP status granted them a special preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection. And there it was: In a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal — a delicate but dazzling 10-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it.

The docent began to describe the history of the Koechert Diamond Pearl, better known as the Sisi Star — it was one of many similar pieces specially crafted for Empress Elisabeth to be worn in her magnificently long and lovely braids. Sisi, as she was affectionately known, was assassinated 100 years ago. Only two stars remain, and it has been 75 years since the public had a glimpse of…

Blanchard wasn’t listening. He was noting the motion sensors in the corner, the type of screws on the case, the large windows nearby. To hear Blanchard tell it, he has a savantlike ability to assess security flaws, like a criminal Rain Man who involuntarily sees risk probabilities at every turn. And the numbers came up good for the star. Blanchard knew he couldn’t fence the piece, which he did hear the guide say was worth $2 million. Still, he found the thing mesmerizing and the challenge irresistible.

He began to work immediately, videotaping every detail of the star’s chamber. (He even coyly shot the “No Cameras” sign near the jewel case.) He surreptitiously used a key to loosen the screws when the staff moved on to the next room, unlocked the windows, and determined that the motion sensors would allow him to move — albeit very slowly — inside the castle. He stopped at the souvenir shop and bought a replica of the Sisi Star to get a feel for its size. He also noted the armed guards stationed at every entrance and patrolling the halls.

But the roof was unguarded, and it so happened that one of the skills Blanchard had picked up in his already long criminal career was skydiving. He had also recently befriended a German pilot who was game for a mercenary sortie and would help Blanchard procure a parachute. Just one night after his visit to the star, Blanchard was making his descent to the roof.

Aerial approaches are a tricky business, though, and Blanchard almost overshot the castle, slowing himself just enough by skidding along a pitched gable. Sliding down the tiles, arms and legs flailing for a grip, Blanchard managed to save himself from falling four stories by grabbing a railing at the roof’s edge. For a moment, he lay motionless. Then he took a deep breath, unhooked the chute, retrieved a rope from his pack, wrapped it around a marble column, and lowered himself down the side of the building.

Carefully, Blanchard entered through the window he had unlocked the previous day. He knew there was a chance of encountering guards. But the Schloss Schönbrunn was a big place, with more than 1,000 rooms. He liked the odds. If he heard guards, he figured, he would disappear behind the massive curtains.

The nearby rooms were silent as Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.

Within minutes, the Sisi Star was in Blanchard’s pocket and he was rappelling down a back wall to the garden, taking the rope with him as he slipped from the grounds. When the star was dramatically unveiled to the public the next day, Blanchard returned to watch visitors gasp at the sheer beauty of a cheap replica. And when his parachute was later found in a trash bin, no one connected it to the star, because no one yet knew it was missing. It was two weeks before anyone realized that the jewelry had disappeared.

Later, the Sisi Star rode inside the respirator of some scuba gear back to his home base in Canada, where Blanchard would assemble what prosecutors later called, for lack of a better term, the Blanchard Criminal Organization. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso.

“Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative,” as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, “We had never seen anything like it.”


Like a criminal Rain Man, Gerald Blanchard possessed a savantlike ability to exploit security flaws.
Photo: John Midgley
Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a 6-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn’t afford milk, and one day, after a long stretch of dry cereal, the boy spotted some recently delivered bottles on a neighbor’s porch. “I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mission,” he says. “And no one saw me take it.” His heart was pounding, and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual. “After that,” he says, “I was hooked.”

Blanchard moved to Nebraska, started going by his middle name, Daniel, and became an accomplished thief. He didn’t look the part — slim, short, and bespectacled, he resembled a young Bill Gates — but he certainly played it, getting into enough trouble to land in reform school. “The way I met Daniel was that he stole my classroom VCR,” recalls Randy Flanagan, one of Blanchard’s teachers. Flanagan thought he might be able to straighten out the soft-spoken and polite kid, so he took Blanchard under his wing in his home-mechanics class.

“He was a real natural in there,” Flanagan says. Blanchard’s mother remembers that even as a toddler he could take anything apart. Despite severe dyslexia and a speech impediment, Blanchard “was an absolute genius with his hands,” the teacher recalls. In Flanagan’s class, Blanchard learned construction, woodworking, model building, and automotive mechanics. The two bonded, and Flanagan became a father figure to Blanchard, driving him to and from school and looking out for him. “He could see that I had talent,” Blanchard says. “And he wanted me to put it to good use.”

Flanagan had seen many hopeless kids straighten out — “You never know when something’s going to change forever for someone,” he says — and he still hoped that would happen to Blanchard. “But Daniel was the type of kid who would spend more time trying to cheat on a test than it would have taken to study for it,” Flanagan says with a laugh.

In fact, by early in his high school years, Blanchard had already abandoned his after-school job stocking groceries to pursue more lucrative opportunities, like fencing tens of thousands of dollars in goods stolen by department store employees he had managed to befriend. “I could just tell who would work with me,” he says. “It’s a gift, I guess.”

Blanchard began mastering the workings of myriad mechanical devices and electronics. He became obsessed with cameras and surveillance: documenting targets, his own exploits, and his huge piles of money. Befitting a young tech enthusiast, he emptied an entire RadioShack one Easter Sunday. At age 16, he bought a house with more than $100,000 in cash. (He hired a lawyer to handle the money and sign the deal on his behalf.) When he moved in, Blanchard told his mother that the home belonged to a friend. “She looked the other way,” Blanchard says. “And I tried to keep it all from her.”

Around this time, Blanchard was arrested for theft. He did several months behind bars and was released into Flanagan’s custody after the older man vouched for him at a hearing. “He was great with our own kids,” Flanagan says. “And I still thought he might come around.” But Blanchard’s burgeoning criminal career was hard to ignore, as he often flaunted his ill-gotten gains. “I wasn’t surprised when the FBI came knocking one day,” Flanagan says. “He’d pull out a fistful of hundreds and peel one off to pay for pizza.”

In April 1993, Blanchard was nabbed by the cops in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for a suspected car arson and brought back to police headquarters. “They kept me in the interrogation room past midnight,” Blanchard says. “And at a certain point, I managed to sneak into the next room and slip through the tiles into the ceiling.” Undetected, he heard the cops run down the hall, thinking he’d gone out the fire escape. After waiting a couple of hours, Blanchard lowered himself down into the mostly empty station, stole a police coat, badge, radio, and revolver. After leaving a single bullet on the desk of his interrogator, he took the elevator to the main floor and strolled right past the front desk on his way out of the station. He hitchhiked at dawn back to Omaha on the back of a motorcycle, holding his purloined police cap down in the wind. “Why are you wearing a uniform?” the driver asked. “Costume party,” Blanchard said as the sun came up. “Really fun time.”

The next day, Blanchard was re-apprehended by a SWAT team, which had to use flash grenades to extricate him from his mother’s attic. But he surprised the cops by escaping yet again, this time from the back of a police cruiser. “They got out of the car and left the keys,” Blanchard says. “There was no barrier, so I fiddled with the cuffs until I got my hands in front of me, locked the doors, slipped up front, and put it in gear.” The authorities gave chase until Blanchard swerved into a steak-house parking lot, fled on foot, and was finally recaptured.

This time, Blanchard served four years and his sentence came with a deportation order attached. In March 1997, he was released to his Canadian homeland and barred from returning to the US for five years.

“After that,” Flanagan says, “I heard from Daniel once or twice a year, thanking me for what I had done for him.” Blanchard sent pictures of himself vacationing around the world, on exclusive beaches, posing in front of Viennese castles. He said he had his own security business. “I wanted that to be true,” Flanagan says. “But I had a hunch he was more likely in the anti-security business.”

In 2001, Blanchard was driving around Edmonton when he saw a new branch of the Alberta Treasury bank going up. His internal algorithm calculated low risk, and he began to case the target meticulously. It had been three years since the Sisi Star theft, and it was time to try something big and new.

As the bank was being built, Blanchard frequently sneaked inside — sometimes at night, sometimes in broad daylight, disguised as a delivery person or construction worker. There’s less security before the money shows up, and that allowed Blanchard to plant various surveillance devices in the ATM room. He knew when the cash machines were installed and what kind of locks they had. He ordered the same locks online and reverse engineered them at home. Later he returned to the Alberta Treasury to disassemble, disable, and remount the locks.

The take at this bank was a modest 60 grand, but the thrill mattered more than the money anyway. Blanchard’s ambition flowered, as did his technique. As Flanagan had observed, Blanchard always wanted to beat the system, and he was getting better at it.


From left: Blanchard at age 8; with his then-wife and father-in-law in Prague, 1998; Blanchard's girlfriend enjoying his proceeds in 2006.
Photos: Courtesy of Gerald Blanchard
Blanchard targeted a half-dozen banks over the next few years. He’d get in through the air-conditioning ductwork, at times contorting his body to fit inside really tight spaces. Other times, he would pick the locks. If there were infrared sensors, he’d use IR goggles to see the beams. Or he’d simply fool the sensor by blocking the beam with a lead film bag.

He assembled an arsenal of tools: night-vision cameras, long-range lenses, high-gain antennas that could pick up the feeds from the audio and video recorders he hid inside a bank, scanners programmed with the encryption keys for police frequencies. He always had a burglary kit on hand containing ropes, uniforms, cameras, and microphones. In the Edmonton branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, which he hit in 2002, he installed a metal panel near the AC ducts to create a secret crawl space that he could disappear into if surprised by police.

Such evasive action was never required, however, in part because Blanchard had also memorized the mechanics of the Mas-Hamilton and La Gard locks that many banks used for their ATMs. (These are big, complicated contraptions, and when police later interrogated Blanchard, they presented him with a Mas-Hamilton lock in dozens of pieces. He stunned them by reassembling it in 40 seconds.)

Blanchard also learned how to turn himself into someone else. Sometimes it was just a matter of donning a yellow hard hat from Home Depot. But it could also be more involved. Eventually, Blanchard used legitimate baptism and marriage certificates — filled out with his assumed names — to obtain real driver’s licenses. He would even take driving tests, apply for passports, or enroll in college classes under one of his many aliases: James Gehman, Daniel Wall, or Ron Aikins. With the help of makeup, glasses, or dyed hair, Blanchard gave James, Daniel, Ron, and the others each a different look.

Over the years, Blanchard procured and stockpiled IDs and uniforms from various security companies and even law enforcement agencies. Sometimes, just for fun and to see whether it would work, he pretended to be a reporter so he could hang out with celebrities. He created VIP passes and applied for press cards so he could go to NHL playoff games or take a spin around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with racing legend Mario Andretti. He met the prince of Monaco at a yacht race in Monte Carlo and interviewed Christina Aguilera at one of her concerts.

That’s where, in July 2000, Blanchard met Angela James. She had flowing black hair and claimed to work for Ford Models. They got along right away, and Blanchard was elated when she gave him her number. He sensed that the teenager was “down with crime” — someone he could count on for help.

Blanchard liked having a sidekick. James was a fun, outgoing party animal who had plenty of free time. She eventually began helping Blanchard on bank jobs. They’d tag-team on daylight reconnaissance, where her striking looks provided a distraction while Blanchard gathered information. At night, she’d be the lookout.

Though they were never involved romantically, James and Blanchard traveled together around the world, stopping in the Caribbean to stash his loot in offshore accounts. They camped out at resorts in Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos islands, depositing money in $10,000 increments into some of Blanchard’s 13 pseudonymously held accounts. The money in the offshore accounts was to pay for his jet-setting lifestyle. The money back in Canada would bankroll his real estate transactions. The funds sitting in Europe were there, well, in case anything happened to him.

After midnight on Saturday, May 15, 2004, as the northern prairie winter was finally giving way to spring, Blanchard walked up to the front door of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in the Mega Centre, a suburban development in Winnipeg. He quickly jimmied the lock, slipped inside, and locked the door behind him. It was a brand-new branch that was set to open for business on Monday, and Blanchard knew that the cash machines had been loaded on Friday.

Thorough as ever, Blanchard had spent many previous nights infiltrating the bank to do recon or to tamper with the locks while James acted as lookout, scanning the vicinity with binoculars and providing updates via a scrambled-band walkie-talkie. He had put a transmitter behind an electrical outlet, a pinhole video camera in a thermostat, and a cheap baby monitor behind the wall. He had even mounted handles on the drywall panels so he could remove them to enter and exit the ATM room. Blanchard had also taken detailed measurements of the room and set up a dummy version in a friend’s nearby machine shop. With practice, he had gotten his ATM-cracking routine down to where he needed only 90 seconds after the alarm tripped to finish and escape with his score.

As Blanchard approached, he saw that the door to the ATM room was unlocked and wide open. Sometimes you get lucky. All he had to do was walk inside.

From here he knew the drill by heart. There were seven machines, each with four drawers. He set to work quickly, using just the right technique to spring the machines open without causing any telltale damage. Well rehearsed, Blanchard wheeled out boxes full of cash and several money counters, locked the door behind him, and headed to a van he had parked nearby.

Eight minutes after Blanchard broke into the first ATM, the Winnipeg Police Service arrived in response to the alarm. However, the officers found the doors locked and assumed the alarm had been an error. As the police pronounced the bank secure, Blanchard was zipping away with more than half a million dollars.

The following morning was a puzzler for authorities. There were no indications of damage to the door, no fingerprints, and no surveillance recordings — Blanchard had stolen the hard drives that stored footage from the bank’s cameras. Moreover, Blanchard’s own surveillance equipment was still transmitting from inside the ATM room, so before he skipped town, he could listen in on investigators. He knew their names; he knew their leads. He would call both the bank manager’s cell phone and the police, posing as an anonymous informant who had been involved in the heist and was swindled out of his share. It was the contractors, he’d say. Or the Brinks guy. Or the maintenance people. His tips were especially convincing because he had a piece of inside information: One of the bank’s ATMs was left untouched. Blanchard had done that on purpose to make it easier to sow confusion.


Winnipeg police officers Larry Levasseur (left) and Mitch McCormick were relentless in their pursuit of Blanchard.
Photo: John Midgley
With the cops outmatched and chasing red herrings, the Winnipeg bank job looked like a perfect crime. Then officials got a call from a vigilant employee at a nearby Walmart, which shared a large parking lot with the bank. He had been annoyed at people leaving cars there, so he took it upon himself to scan the lot. On the night of the break-in, he spotted a blue Dodge Caravan next to the bank. Seeing a dolly and other odd equipment inside, he took down the license plate number. Police ran it. The vehicle had been rented from Avis by one Gerald Daniel Blanchard.

Blanchard’s use of his real name was as careless as the fingerprints police found inside the getaway van recovered by the rental company. Soon the cops were on his tail.

Because of the heist’s sophistication, the investigation fell to Winnipeg’s Major Crimes unit. But Blanchard — now divorced and living with his girlfriend, Lynette Tien — learned that he had become a suspect, so he stayed out of their sights. Two years passed, and many of the investigators who had dealt with the initial leads retired or were transferred.

The case went cold until early 2006, when Mitch McCormick, a veteran officer in his fifties, started working on major crimes and decided to take a look at the unsolved robbery. Intrigued, he called his longtime colleague Larry Levasseur, a wiretap ace who had just been transferred to the Commercial Crimes division.

One night in early February, McCormick and Levasseur sat down at the King’s Head bar, a favorite local police haunt. Levasseur went through several pints of amber ale, and McCormick had his usual double rye and a Coke tall. McCormick filled him in on the Blanchard leads and gave him the case file to take home.

The two were interested, but McCormick’s boss was skeptical. Why spend money chasing a criminal who was committing most of his crimes outside their jurisdiction? Eventually, though, the two stubborn cops made such a fuss that the department brass relented. “But we got no resources and had to put together a task force out of thin air,” McCormick says. “It was like the set of Barney Miller. We knew it was bad when we had to buy our own Post-its.”

They quickly started filling up those Post-its and arranging them on a corkboard, mapping Blanchard’s sprawling network. The case was overwhelming, but they eventually unraveled his tangle of 32 false names. Their preliminary checks also showed that Blanchard was a person of interest in many crimes, including the unsolved theft of the Sisi Star nearly 10 years earlier. They assembled roughly 275 pages of documentation, enough to persuade a judge to let them tap Blanchard’s 18 phones. Now they were in business. They were taking a professional flier on this case. They dubbed their investigation Project Kite.

Usually wiretaps are a waiting game; cops will listen to secretive organized crime syndicates for years, hoping for one little slip. But Blanchard was surprisingly loose-lipped. The second weekend the wires went live, McCormick and Levasseur heard him directing a team of underlings in a product-return fraud at a Best Buy. More scams followed. They heard him wheeling and dealing in real estate. They listened in as he planned his next bank job. They learned about a vast network of sophisticated crime. For a smart criminal, McCormick and Levasseur thought, this guy sure did talk a lot.

Then, on November 16, 2006, Blanchard got a particularly intriguing call.

“Hello, Danny,” a man with a thick British accent said. “Are you ready? I have a job for you. How soon can you get to Cairo?”

McCormick and Levasseur listened with astonishment as Blanchard immediately set about recruiting his own small team to meet up with another group in Egypt. Blanchard referred to his contact as the Boss — he couldn’t pronounce his real name — and explained to his cohorts that there was money to be made with this guy.

James was in. But her parents were in town visiting, and her mother didn’t want her to go. James put her mom on the phone so Blanchard could talk the woman into giving her daughter permission to join him in a criminal escapade across the globe. “We’re going to make a lot of money,” he said. “But don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”

Several of his regular guys couldn’t make it, so Blanchard called his neighbor, a Congolese immigrant named Balume Kashongwe. When Blanchard explained the job, Kashongwe volunteered right away. With his team assembled, Blanchard thought, “This is going to be easy. What could go wrong?” Just a few hours after the Boss’ call, Blanchard, Kashongwe, and James were in the air, en route to Cairo.

Blanchard had first met the Boss a few months earlier in London at an electronics store. He could tell they were kindred spirits by a glance at the Boss’ purchases: eight DVR recorders. Blanchard knew you didn’t buy a load like that for anything but surveillance. The two struck up a conversation.

Later that day, a car arrived to take Blanchard to a London café, where the Boss and a dozen Kurdish henchmen, most from northern Iraq, were waiting in the basement, smoking hookahs. The Boss filled Blanchard in on his operation, which spanned Europe and the Middle East and included various criminal activities, including counterfeiting and fraud. The latest endeavor was called skimming: gleaning active debit and credit card numbers by patching into the ISDN lines that companies use to process payments. The group manufactured counterfeit cards magnetized and embossed with the stolen numbers and then used them to withdraw the maximum daily limits before the fraud was reported. It was a lucrative venture for the Boss’ network, which funneled a portion of its take to Kurdish separatists in Iraq.

Living up to his new nickname, the Boss gave Blanchard a trial job: taking 25 cards to Canada to retrieve cash. Blanchard returned to London with $60,000, and the Boss was pleased. He found the younger man charming and steady as well. “We have something big coming,” he told Blanchard over dinner at a Kurdish restaurant. “I’ll keep you posted.”

With that job now at hand, Blanchard’s crew arrived in Egypt and checked into the Cairo Marriott Hotel & Omar Khayyam Casino, settling into a couple of suites with sweeping views of the Nile. The next day, three men Blanchard remembered from the London cafè showed up. They brought roughly 1,000 pirated cards, which the group immediately started using in teams of two. Kashongwe and the Kurds from London blended in easily. Blanchard and James bought burkas in the souk as disguises. The Boss directed operations from London.

They went from ATM to ATM for 12 hours a day, withdrawing Egyptian pounds and stuffing the bills into backpacks and suitcases. Blanchard and James folded their cash into pouches hidden beneath the burkas. And as usual, Blanchard filmed the entire adventure: the wandering through Cairo’s Byzantine streets, the downtime in the city, the money pouring in.

Back in their bare-bones Winnipeg office, McCormick and Levasseur were monitoring their target’s email accounts and calls back to Tien, who was managing travel arrangements and other administrative details from Blanchard’s condo in Vancouver. The Canadian cops were stunned. They never imagined they’d come across anything this big. They learned about the loot piling up 4 feet high in the suites at the Marriott. And then they learned that everything had gone to hell.

In the course of a week, the team collected the equivalent of more than $2 million. But the individual ATM payouts were small, so after a couple of days Blanchard sent Kashongwe south to Nairobi, Kenya, with 50 cards to find more-generous machines. Kashongwe had no cell phone, though, and he went suspiciously incommunicado. Soon it became clear that Kashongwe was AWOL. Blanchard wasn’t happy. And neither was the Boss.

Blanchard was in over his head. In his many years of crime, guns had never been involved. The Boss, however, seemed inclined to change that. Blanchard promised to track down Kashongwe. “Good,” the Boss said. “Otherwise, we’ll find him. And he won’t be happy when we do.”

McCormick and Levasseur listened to the calls in and out of Cairo as temperatures rose. They could hear Blanchard calling Tien back in Vancouver, trying desperately to reach Kashongwe. He called Kashongwe’s sister in Brussels and his brother in Ottawa. He sounded frantic at times. But Blanchard had no luck; Kashongwe had vanished.

Things took another turn for the worse when the Boss told Blanchard he couldn’t leave Cairo until the missing cards were accounted for. Two more men arrived to “keep an eye on things.” The Marriott suites had turned into a hostage scene.

But Blanchard’s natural charm worked on the Boss, too. He took full responsibility, promised to personally pay back Kashongwe’s share, and calmly argued that James didn’t have anything to do with the double cross. The Boss eventually told his men to let James go. Then he agreed to let Blanchard travel to London to smooth things out in person. “I’m pretty honest about that kind of thing,” Blanchard says. “And the Boss could see that I was taking responsibility for my guy.”

The two decided to set aside the Kashongwe problem in the interest of business. The Boss’ men would meet Blanchard back in Canada with a new batch of cards. “After all,” Blanchard says, “why fight when there was more money to be made?”

On December 3, 2006, Blanchard landed in Vancouver, where he immediately rented a car and drove straight to a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, 65 miles east in Chilliwack. He’d started prepping to burglarize the bank before his trip. The Kashongwe fiasco ended up nearly costing Blanchard money, and now he was after a sizable payday. Chilliwack was good for $800,000, he figured, and he would work through the holidays to get it done.

McCormick and Levasseur had both been on duty during the holidays before, but never had a case so consumed them. They were spending 18-hour days in their makeshift headquarters or at the King’s Head, poring over transcripts and evidence. They got no overtime pay. The strain grew, as did the pressure from higher-ups.

Lucky for them, Blanchard’s disarray was compounding his mistakes. As soon as he touched down, McCormick and Levasseur picked up Blanchard live, discussing Cairo, his next bank, and the potential whereabouts of Kashongwe. While Blanchard was en route to Chilliwack, they listened to him and the Boss discuss details about the arrival of a team in Montreal the next day.

McCormick and Levasseur called officials at the Montreal airport with names and flight information. As the targets strode through the airport, the cops swarmed in. The team was detained, and police seized dozens of blank credit cards, a card writer, and computers overflowing with evidence that filled in the blanks on the Cairo operation. To top it off, the hard drives also contained some of Blanchard’s comprehensive amateur crime video of that job. Now the police could not only hear him talking about crimes, they could see him committing them.

The Boss phoned the very next day, panicked. But the call caught Blanchard at an inopportune moment. “I can’t talk right now,” Blanchard whispered. “I’m doing my thing inside the bank right now.” It was 12:30 am, and Blanchard was crawling through the bank’s ductwork.

“Listen, my guys got arrested in the airport, and I need to find out why,” the Boss said. Blanchard was making his way painstakingly through the air vents, en route to the ATM room. His earpiece was taped in and the phone was on auto-answer, in case he got a call that the police were nearby. “What’s going on with my guys in Montreal?” the Boss demanded. “They got pulled in!”

“I have no idea,” Blanchard said softly. “But it’s too much of a coincidence that customs knew. The phones must be tapped.”

The Boss pressed on, asking for news about Kashongwe, but Blanchard interrupted. “I’m looking down. There’s a security guard down there right now,” he breathed. He was deep into the building, making it hard to shimmy his way out in case he needed an emergency escape. “I have too much invested in this job,” he said. “I have to go.”

“We need to fix this, Danny,” the Boss said.

As Blanchard whispered back, McCormick and Levasseur were triangulating the call’s location. Now they knew Blanchard was targeting Chilliwack’s Bank of Nova Scotia. In late January, investigators from Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver as well as provincial police and the Mounties had joined McCormick and Levasseur’s small operation. “Project Kite was ready to be reeled in,” McCormick says.

At 4 am on January 23, 2007, more than a dozen SWAT team members swarmed Blanchard’s Vancouver condo, where they found Blanchard and Tien. Several other search warrants were executed simultaneously across Canada, turning up half a dozen accomplices, including Angela James and Blanchard’s cousin Dale Fedoruk.

Blanchard was busted. At his various residences and storage facilities, police confiscated 10 pallets of material: 60,000 documents, cash in various currencies, smoke bombs, firearms, and 300 electronic devices, including commercial card printers, card readers, and all manner of surveillance equipment. In his condo, police discovered a hidden room stocked with burglary kits and well-organized, itemized documentation of all Blanchard’s fake identities. He was initially charged with 41 crimes, ranging from fraud to possession of instruments for forging credit cards.

The Boss called Blanchard in jail on the prison phone. “Why you, Danny?” he asked. “Why would little Winnipeg go to all that trouble? You must have upset the establishment. It’s like we say in England: You fuck with the Queen, and they fuck with you.”

As McCormick and Levasseur listened in, Blanchard said it wasn’t the establishment, or the Queen. “It was these Keystone Kops out here in Winnipeg.”

Blanchard says that he could have escaped from jail again, but there was no point. The police had all the evidence, including 120 video- and audiotapes detailing everything. They’d just find him again, and he was tired of running anyhow.

Blanchard refused to make statements about any of his associates, but he eventually decided to cooperate with authorities about his own case. “He’s a flamboyant guy,” McCormick says. “And an extrovert, recording everything. Some part of him just wanted to tell his story.” He had another incentive, too: Revealing his methods, which would help the banking industry improve its security practices, could earn him a lighter prison sentence.

The first day that Levasseur sat down with Blanchard in Vancouver, the investigator felt like he “was talking to a wall.” But in later interviews, Blanchard became more courteous and helpful. Finally, after some negotiations through his lawyer, Blanchard offered to take them to the Sisi Star. “It’s right here in my grandmother’s basement in Winnipeg,” he said. Blanchard had tried to steer clear of his family since his arrest; he didn’t want to embarrass them further. But now he had to call. “I need to come to the house,” he said. “And I’m bringing the police.”

Blanchard, in handcuffs and leg shackles, hugged his grandmother at the door and took McCormick and Levasseur directly into the basement. He disappeared into a crawl space with Levasseur. It was quiet except for the sound of them grappling with the insulation. Eventually, Levasseur removed a square of Styrofoam and pulled out the star.

They brought it out into the light, where the detectives marveled at the beauty of the piece. They’d never seen anything like it. That kicked off nearly a month of debriefing. The cops had gotten some stuff right, but Blanchard set them straight on the rest. “Never in policing does the bad guy tell you, ‘Here’s how I did it, down to the last detail,’” McCormick says. “And that’s what he did.”

After spending so much time chasing Blanchard — and then talking to him — McCormick and Levasseur developed a grudging regard for his abilities. And Blanchard grew to admire their relentless investigation. Like a cornered hacker who trades his black hat for white, Blanchard took on a new challenge: working the system from the inside. He provided such good information that McCormick and Levasseur were able to put together an eight-hour presentation for law enforcement and banking professionals. “When those guys hear what Blanchard told us,” McCormick says, “you can hear their assholes pucker shut.”

Blanchard’s full participation came under consideration when he pled guilty to 16 charges on November 7, 2007. He agreed to sell his four condos and pay restitution to the Canadian government. And he was willing to take a longer sentence for himself in exchange for leniency toward his coaccused, whom he refused to testify against. None of his partners served jail time.

Blanchard also surprised the court by having his lawyer issue an unusual statement: an expression of gratitude for being arrested. “My client wishes to recognize that this huge lie that he had been living could now finally fall apart.” It added that Blanchard was looking forward to moving on. “He recognizes that the men and women of the Winnipeg Police Service made that all possible.”

Instead of the maximum of 164 years, Blanchard got eight. And then last summer, after serving less than two, he was released into carefully guarded probation. He now lives in a Vancouver halfway house, where he is prohibited from going anywhere near certain types of surveillance equipment and talking to any of his former associates. One of the people he can call is Randy Flanagan, his old mentor from high school.

“He filled me in about the past 10 years,” Flanagan says. “I was surprised, but not that surprised, about what our little former son had been up to.” Blanchard told Flanagan he wanted to turn his life around. Working with McCormick and Levasseur had convinced him that he could become a consultant to the banks. “Who knows?” Flanagan says. “Maybe he will get that security business he talked about off the ground after all.”

The judge had a similar thought during Blanchard’s plea hearing. The banks “should hire him and pay him a million dollars a year,” he said. And right before sentencing, the judge turned directly to Blanchard. “I think that you have a great future ahead of you if you wish to pursue an honest style of life,” he said. “Although I’m not prepared to sign a letter of reference.”

It's official: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent
Thu Mar 4, 2:07 pm ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100304/sc_nm/us_dinosaurs_asteroid

LONDON (Reuters) – A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades.

A panel of 41 scientists from across the world reviewed 20 years' worth of research to try to confirm the cause of the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which created a "hellish environment" around 65 million years ago and wiped out more than half of all species on the planet.

Scientific opinion was split over whether the extinction was caused by an asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted around 1.5 million years.

The new study, conducted by scientists from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan and published in the journal Science, found that a 15-kilometre (9 miles) wide asteroid slamming into Earth atChicxulub in what is now Mexico was the culprit.

"We now have great confidence that an asteroid was the cause of the KT extinction. This triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on theRichter scale, and continental landslides, which created tsunamis," said Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London, a co-author of the review.

The asteroid is thought to have hit Earth with a force a billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

Morgan said the "final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs" came when blasted material flew into the atmosphere, shrouding the planet in darkness, causing a global winter and "killing off many species that couldn't adapt to this hellish environment."

Scientists working on the study analyzed the work of paleontologists, geochemists, climate modelers, geophysicists and sedimentologists who have been collecting evidence about the KT extinction over the last 20 years.

Geological records show the event that triggered the dinosaurs' demise rapidly destroyed marine and land ecosystems, they said, and the asteroid hit "is the only plausible explanation for this."

Peter Schulte of the University of Erlangen in Germany, a lead author on the study, said fossil records clearly show a mass extinction about 65.5 million years ago -- a time now known as the K-Pg boundary.

Despite evidence of active volcanism in India, marine and land ecosystems only showed minor changes in the 500,000 years before the K-Pg boundary, suggesting the extinction did not come earlier and was not prompted by eruptions.

The Deccan volcano theory is also thrown into doubt by models of atmospheric chemistry, the team said, which show the asteroid impact would have released much larger amounts of sulphur, dust and soot in a much shorter time than the volcanic eruptions could have, causing extreme darkening and cooling.

Gareth Collins, another co-author from Imperial College, said the asteroid impact created a "hellish day" that signaled the end of the 160-million-year reign of the dinosaurs, but also turned out to be a great day for mammals.

"The KT extinction was a pivotal moment in Earth's history, which ultimately paved the way for humans to become the dominant species on Earth," he wrote in a commentary on the study.

(Collins has created a website at http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/Chicxulub.html which allows readers to see the effects of the asteroid impact.)

(Editing by Myra MacDonald)

Weird Science
Sally Satel, 12.08.09, 08:30 PM EST
Neuromarketers claim that brain waves reveal what consumers want.

Neuromarketers are becoming the next generation of Mad Men. They are working for companies like Google, Frito-Lay and Disney. But instead of directly asking consumers whether they like a product, neuromarketers are asking their brains.

Using electroencephalography (EEG)--a technology typically used by neurologists to diagnose seizures--marketers measure brain wave activity in response to advertisements and products. Electrodes placed on the subject's scalp collect the data. The consumer herself doesn't say a thing.

And that's the point. In the new world of neuromarketing, it is the more immediate, unedited emotional brain-level reaction to a product or ad that presumably indicates what the consumer really wants, even if she doesn't really know it. The rational and deliberate responses elicited in focus groups are considered unreliable.

No wonder EmSense, a San Francisco-based market research company, succeeded in raising $9 million in capital last month.

EmSense tests products with a band-like EEG device called the Emband that goes across the consumer's forehead. As she shops, the four sensors contained in the Emband collect data that, according to the company Web site, "open a window into the mind of the consumer."

Brain activation detected through the band's sensors is believed to signal the consumer's emotional engagement with a product. Engagement, in turn, is essential to sustaining interest and in enhancing memorability, important for developing brand loyalty. Yet the practical dimensions of neuromarketing are far from well-established.

First, how well does EEG detect emotion? It can gauge alertness, yes, but the more subtle kinds of mental states that relate to purchasing decisions--such as attraction, disgust, nostalgia or aspirational fantasy--are not accessible via brain wave analysis.

Second, the notion of a discrete "buy button in the brain," as marketers call the holy grail of marketing, is deeply naive. Response to the shape, smell and color of a product is the culmination of complex processes that engage many areas of the brain.

As one team of neuroscientists described it in a medical journal: "Distributed [neural] networks serve to allocate and direct attentional resources to the stimulus, to relate the stimulus to internal representations of self and environment to decide what action to take, to initiate or inhibit the behavioral response, and to update internal representations after receiving feedback about the result of action."

In short, there is nothing close to a direct path between brain activation and actual consumer behavior.

To the extent that brain activation patterns can yield any useful marketing information at all, the more of the brain that is monitored--or the more spatial detail there is--the better. Most EEG marketing firms use devices that cover the entire head, not just the front. These bathing cap lookalikes are studded with from 32 to 64, even 128, sensors in order to maximize the data collected.

Third, and most important, we still don't know whether any measure of neural activity predicts actual market performance or sales better than existing methods. Right now the data that are trumpeted by neuromarketers as revelatory have not been published in peer-reviewed journals. Nor has testing occurred under real-world circumstances in which consumers juggle their pocketbooks, the foreseeable reaction from spouse (??????you bought what?!??????), other purchases they have recently made and even their mood at the time they go shopping.

Companies don't sell to brains; they sell to people. And human actions are determined by an array of motives and impulses that come into play once the subject removes the EEG apparatus from her head.

Until the EEG marketing paradigm can prove itself to independent scientists, consumer actions will always speak louder than brain activation. Nonetheless, the allure of neuromarketing is obvious: Traditional focus groups seem too fuzzy and subjective; brain technology is objective, measurable and scientific.

Having raised an impressive $9 million, the least one can safely say about EmSense is that it surely knows how to market itself. But whether EmSense, or other neuromarketers for that matter, can deliver on their high-tech promises remains to be seen.

Alzheimer's color test:

http://www.humorsphere.com/fun/8787/colortest.swf

Why Computers Can't Mimic The Brain
Lee Gomes, 12.03.09, 06:00 AM EST
Our gray matter is far too complex for machines to simulate.

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- When researchers associated with IBM announced last month that they had created a computer simulation that could be likened to a cat's brain, they hadn't talked beforehand to Ben Barres. They would have profited enormously from the conversation if they had.

In a widely covered announcement, IBM ( IBM - news - people ) said in November that its researchers had simulated a brain with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses, which it noted was about the complexity of a cat's brain. That led many writers to conclude that IBM computers could, as one put it, "simulate the thinking power" of a cat, though Forbes' Andy Greenberg was far more careful in his portrayal.

Getting a computer to work like any sort of brain, even little Fluffy's, would be an epic accomplishment. What IBM did, unfortunately, didn't even come close, as was pointed out a day later by other researchers, who published a letter scolding the company for what they described as a cynical PR stunt.

Any potential over-claiming aside, IBM's brain research follows the same pattern of similar explorations at many other centers. The logic of the approach goes something like this: We know the brain is composed of a network of cells called neurons, which pass messages to each other through connections known as synapses. If we build a model of those neurons and synapses in a computer, we will have a working double of a brain.

Which is where Ben Barres can shed some light. Barres is a neurobiologist and a specialist in something called glial cells. These are brain cells that are nearly as populous as neurons, but which are usually overlooked by researchers because they are presumed to be of little use; a kind of packing material that fills up space in between the neurons, where all the action is.

Barres, though, has made remarkable discoveries about glials. For example, if you take them away, neurons basically stop functioning properly. How? Why? We have no idea.

He does his research in the context of possible treatments for Alzheimer's, but the implications for modeling the brain are obvious, since you can't model something if you don't know how it works.

"We don't even begin to understand how neural circuits work. In fact, we don't even know what we don't know," he says. "The brain is very far from being modeled."

The computer can be a tempting metaphor for the brain, because of the superficial similarities. A computer has transistors and logic gates and networks of nodes; the various parts of the brain can be described in similar terms.

Barres says, though, that engineers seem to have a diminished ability to understand biology, in all its messy glory. Glial cells are one example, as they occupy much of the brain without our knowing barely the first thing about what they really do.

Another example, he says, involves the little matter of blood. Blood flow through the brain--its amplitudes and vagaries--has an enormous impact on the functioning of brain cells. But Barres said it's one that researchers have barely even begun to think about, much less model in a computer.

There are scores of neuroscientists like Barres, with deep knowledge of their special parts of the brain. Most of them will tell you a similar story, about how amazing the brain really is and about the utterly shallow nature of our current understanding of it.

Remember them the next time you read a story claiming some brain-like accomplishment of a computer. The only really human thing these programs are doing is attracting attention to themselves.

Sex, then amnesia...and it's no soap opera

By Madison Park, CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/11/04/transient.global.amnesia/index.html

(CNN) -- It was either mind-blowing or completely forgettable. Either way, Alice doesn't remember.

One August morning, Alice and her husband, Scott, had sex.

That's when things became confusing. Rather than appearing pleased, Alice, 59, seemed disoriented.

As they lay in bed, Scott (the couple asked that their last name not be used) flicked on the television, which was showing the Olympics. This perplexed Alice. "Is there an Olympics?" she asked. This was during the Michael Phelps mania, when the swimmer seemed to be everywhere.

"Are you sure there is an Olympics?" Alice asked again.

Scott recalled, "I saw that something was wrong, so I asked her, 'OK what day is it?' "

Alice appeared even more perplexed.

"Who's our president?" he quizzed.

"Bill Clinton," she answered. This was 2008.

Scott darted out of bed and called 911. The paramedics suspected a stroke and rushed the befuddled Alice to the emergency room.

For decades, doctors described cases of a rare neurological condition that usually occurred in patients over age 50. Neurologists noted that patients knew their identities, but couldn't retain recent memory, where they were and how they got there. They showed no other symptoms.

Sex is one of the major triggers for the baffling medical condition called transient global amnesia in which patients lose their ability to retain immediate memory.

TGA usually occurs after the person engages in strenuous activity -- such as having sex, vigorously exercising, suddenly immersing into icy or hot water, straining to dig a stuck car or even bumping the head.

"The unifying thing about each of them is they produce a sudden and significant change in blood flow," said Dr. Louis Caplan, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Alice arrived at the hospital around 8 a.m. in seemingly perfect health. As medical staff poked and prodded, Alice cheerfully peppered them and her husband with questions.

"Where am I?" she asked.

"You're in the ER," Scott answered.

"How did I get here?"

"The ambulance brought you here," he replied.

"Wow." Alice paused for about 10 minutes, observing the hubbub at the hospital before she repeated her initial questions. At some point, she started asking different ones.

"What was I doing before this? How did I wind up here?" she inquired.

Scott told her.

"So we were..."

"Yeah," Scott answered.

"Then this happened?"

"Yeah."

"Let me get this straight. We had sex. I wind up in the hospital and I can't remember anything?" Alice said. There was a slight pause.

"You owe me a 30-carat diamond!" Alice quipped, laughing. Within minutes, she repeated the same questions in order, delivering the punch line in the exact tone and inflection. It was always a 30-carat diamond.

"It was like a script or a tape," Scott said. "On the one hand, it was very funny. We were hysterical. It was scary as all hell."

While doctors tried to determine what ailed Alice, Scott and other grim-faced relatives and friends gathered at the hospital. Surrounded by anxious loved ones, Alice blithely cracked jokes (the same ones) for hours.

"Let me get this straight," Alice said to her husband. "We had sex. I wind up in the hospital and I can't remember anything? Was it good for you? 'Cuz it wasn't good for me because I couldn't remember anything."

"That's the closest I came in my life to being hysterical," Scott said. "You're literally laughing and crying at the same time."

Hours later, the doctors made the diagnosis. And figured out the cause.

"This is actually a well-known precipitator. One of the things people have done to look at transient global amnesia is to look at frequency of various precipitants and sex always comes out as one of the most common," said Caplan, a leading stroke expert at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not associated with Alice's care.

"It usually is after climax that it develops," he said about its onset.

Patients who have a history of migraines and headaches are more likely to get TGA as some people report getting terrible head pains related to orgasms, called coital headaches.

"I remember the previous night going to sleep with a subtle headache and not taking anything for it," Alice recalled. "And apparently, the next morning, my husband and I had intercourse. From what I found out, there was an orgasm."

In 1999, Johns Hopkins University doctors described two patients in their 70s who suffered TGA after having sex. In these cases, the act of "bearing down" -- which occurs when people move their bowels, give birth or have sex -- created pressure in the brain's blood vessels, resulting in temporary lack of blood flow that caused amnesia, according to the study published in The Lancet.

Levitra, which is a pill for erectile dysfunction, lists TGA as a possible adverse reaction.

Caplan likened the hippocampus, which is responsible for short-term memory in the brain, to a tape recorder. If blood flow to the brain gets restricted, the hippocampus cannot record new memory.

"The hippocampus is responsible for initially recording the information so you can play it back," he said. "So if it's not working, you won't get the information."

TGA usually occurs once, but in some cases, it could become recurrent. Studies that took advanced brain imaging of patients experiencing TGA showed abnormalities in the cerebral arteries in the left hippocampus of some, Caplan said.

"It's not enough of a stimulus or deprivation that it permanently injures the brain. The brain recovers," he said. "There should be no deficit other than memory and it should be brief."

As the day progressed, Alice's repetitive questions came every 10 minutes, every 15, then 30, until she regained her immediate memory. Around 2:30 p.m. that day, Alice remembers sitting on a hospital bed and seeing her husband looking upset.

Although Alice recovered fully, she still cannot remember what happened that morning. The last thing she remembered was going to bed the night before with a slight pain in the right, rear area of her head.

"I was lucky because nothing bad came of it," said Alice, now 60. "I wasn't frightened. My husband and family were frightened. I was totally out to lunch."

One consequence from the amnesia was that it provided her two grown children with too much information about their parents' sex life.

A year after her episode, Alice said the amnesia had not deterred her sex life, but she avoids having intercourse when she has a headache. She tells her husband, "So sorry, you can wait."

And Alice has yet to receive a 30-carat diamond for all her troubles.

I dare say there weren't that many traders who loaded
up at that ridiculous low price, although too many on the
board brag they have
<the volume at that time/price level was marginal,
a few couple hundred thousand shares on a daily basis, sometimes
not even that>
I have not added neither sold.
Enjoy your weekend, mine is almost ending

Thanks Dubi, I have been rooting for IDTA ever since you first told me about them.

Unfortunately I lost money on them (made money a couple of times but lost overall) after the stock sank so much from its high a few years ago.

But I've followed them ever since then because I sense they may be one of the few legit pink sheet companies and may eventually become a sizable company. It seems their biggest challenge is overcoming entrenched competitors. I also wonder how quickly they can scale up their operations in the event of a big contract, and how that same question might deter a large contract.

I sure wish I had had a decent position at .0002, what a return since then... I hope you added some shares before the recent resurgence.

I've been out of AIDO for a long time, what a scam that turned out to be. Unfortunately I paid for that mistake too.

COR... what a long running story. By far the stock I have followed the closest and longest. Like IDTA, I've made money on it at times, but overall lost plenty.... way too much sadly.

I'm mostly out of COR now but still hold some shares.

I'm realistic about its prospects now, which I consider minimal - they're forced to do a deal now with their back against the wall, and it's easy to predict how that will turn out. But I do think their science has value and sooner or later there will be a point when the stock goes from .05 to .30 or something like that, whatever the numbers are.

The trick as always will be figuring out when to buy... just like it was with IDTA.

If you ever think it's a great time to jump back into IDTA, please shoot me a PM.

Have a great weekend!

Hi Aiming,
Glad you liked the link, very demonstrative link it
is indeed!
In regards IDTA, I would not wholeheartedly recommend
purchasing its shares, although I do think the company
is better off today than it was a couple of years ago.
I guess there are too many starters/outlets which soon
enough prove to be wishful thinking, half completed
ideas or simply unfulfilled plans.
Having said that, i still hold my basic holdings in the
stock, hence definitely not looking into the daily
changes. As for the board, i hardly read it <unless
I am looking for some funny stuff/joke, especially
when it comes from unbelievable Richie >
As for AIDO, hopefully you bailed out in time, as i would
hope you got out from COR too (?)

Regards
Dubi

Thanks Dubi - that's really neat, and useful for helping wrap the brain around the scale we're talking about. I'm going to send that link to several teachers I know.

The slider concept makes it really intuitive, as opposed to different pages to look at.

Congrats with IDTA! What's your gut feeling... still a good time for someone buying in now to do well with it? I follow the IDTA board, but liked it a lot more when you were the Mod... the "new guy" was one of Mod of the board pimping AIDO all the way down to where it is now - and I remember you warning me about that one a few years ago.

Cell Size and Scale

Using the slider under the picture, go from a coffee bean to a carbon atom.

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

This story still gets me...

it's a great one to remember every time you read something bad or disappointing about big time sports....

The video is great:

How David Beats Goliath

When underdogs break the rules.

by Malcolm Gladwell

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true

When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.

But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? The Turks sat in Medina “on the defensive, immobile.” There were so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel and water, that they could hardly make a major move across the desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their point of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. Instead of focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage war over the broadest territory possible.

The Bedouins under Lawrence’s command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them “an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle.” But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, forty-five pounds of flour, and a pint of drinking water, which meant that he could travel as much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the desert, even in summer. “Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,” Lawrence wrote. “Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage.” The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs. In one typical stretch, in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24th, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-Naam on March 25th, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27th, raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29th, returned to Buair and sabotaged the railway line again on March 31st, dynamited eleven rails at Hediah on April 3rd, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Dhaiji on April 4th and 5th, and attacked twice on April 6th.

Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus, in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” of one stage in the journey:


We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.

When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks, and lost only two men. The Turks simply did not think that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the desert. This was Lawrence’s great insight. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

Vivek Ranadivé is an elegant man, slender and fine-boned, with impeccable manners and a languorous walk. His father was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he says, because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of India’s planes. Ranadivé went to M.I.T., because he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his way. The Ranadivés are relentless.

In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Silicon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as “real time” processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he’s “batch processing.” There is a gap between the events in the company—sales—and his understanding of those events. Wall Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of databases. The trader would collect information from here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What Ranadivé’s company, TIBCO, did was to consolidate those databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, TIBCO’s software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.

Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”

A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two. “Everything in the world is now real time,” he said. “So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, “deliberation” just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it’s several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.

Is it any wonder that Ranadivé looked at the way basketball was played and found it mindless? A professional basketball game was forty-eight minutes long, divided up into alternating possessions of roughly twenty seconds: back and forth, back and forth. But a good half of each twenty-second increment was typically taken up with preliminaries and formalities. The point guard dribbled the ball up the court. He stood above the top of the key, about twenty-four feet from the opposing team’s basket. He called out a play that the team had choreographed a hundred times in practice. It was only then that the defending team sprang into action, actively contesting each pass and shot. Actual basketball took up only half of that twenty-second interval, so that a game’s real length was not forty-eight minutes but something closer to twenty-four minutes—and that twenty-four minutes of activity took place within a narrowly circumscribed area. It was as formal and as convention-bound as an eighteenth-century quadrille. The supporters of that dance said that the defensive players had to run back to their own end, in order to compose themselves for the arrival of the other team. But the reason they had to compose themselves, surely, was that by retreating they allowed the offense to execute a play that it had practiced to perfection. Basketball was batch!

Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent. “And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.

Ranadivé’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division, representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a series of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, the former all-pro running back for the San Francisco 49ers, who is also TIBCO’s director of business development. As a football player, Craig was legendary for the off-season hill workouts he put himself through. Most of his N.F.L. teammates are now hobbling around golf courses. He has run seven marathons. After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who played Division I basketball at Duke and U.S.C. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order to shut her down. The girls loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “It was so awesome to have her along.”

Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that’s not an issue, because teams don’t contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.

The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent’s end, within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”

The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time, they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to take low-percentage, long-range shots that required skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by three points.

“What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” Rometra Craig said. She helped out once Redwood City advanced to the regional championships. “We could hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup, because as long as we played hard on defense we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, ‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’ But they understood their roles.” A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. “They were awesome,” she said.

Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—the railroad—and not where they were strong, Medina. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. Lawrence extended the battlefield over as large an area as possible. So did the girls of Redwood City. They defended all ninety-four feet. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence . . . courage.”

“It’s an exhausting strategy,” Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a TIBCO conference room, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table.

“My girls had to be more fit than the others,” Ranadivé said.

“He used to make them run,” Craig said, nodding approvingly.

“We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.” He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?”

The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison, “One, two, three, ATTITUDE!”

That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

“One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadivé said, “and so in the first practice I had I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not One, two three, ATTITUDE. It’s One, two, three, attitude HAH ’ ”—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.

In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of the season, which meant that their tallest player was six feet five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was six feet two. But from the opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press, and never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. “These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won, 87–79.

In the world of basketball, there is one story after another like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. People look at upsets like Fordham over UMass and call them flukes. Basketball sages point out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers—and that is true. Ranadivé readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Playing insurgent basketball did not guarantee victory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath. If Fordham had played UMass the conventional way, it would have lost by thirty points. And yet somehow that lesson has escaped the basketball establishment.

What did Digger Phelps do, the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. The UMass coach, Jack Leaman, was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids. Did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not.

The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that game was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn’t play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, thirty-eight years later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. “They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage.”

Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. At the University of Kentucky, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Pitino took his team to the Final Four three times—and won a national championship—with full-court pressure, and then rode the full-court press back to the Final Four in 2005, as the coach at the University of Louisville. This year, his Louisville team entered the N.C.A.A. tournament ranked No. 1 in the land. College coaches of Pitino’s calibre typically have had numerous players who have gone on to be bona-fide all-stars at the professional level. In his many years of coaching, Pitino has had one, Antoine Walker. It doesn’t matter. Every year, he racks up more and more victories.

“The greatest example of the press I’ve ever coached was my Kentucky team in ’96, when we played L.S.U.,” Pitino said. He was at the athletic building at the University of Louisville, in a small room filled with television screens, where he watches tapes of opponents’ games. “Do we have that tape?” Pitino called out to an assistant. He pulled a chair up close to one of the monitors. The game began with Kentucky stealing the ball from L.S.U., deep in L.S.U.’s end. Immediately, the ball was passed to Antoine Walker, who cut to the basket for a layup. L.S.U. got the ball back. Kentucky stole it again. Another easy basket by Walker. “Walker had almost thirty points at halftime,” Pitino said. “He dunked it almost every time. When we steal, he just runs to the basket.” The Kentucky players were lightning quick and long-armed, and swarmed around the L.S.U. players, arms flailing. It was mayhem. Five minutes in, it was clear that L.S.U. was panicking.

Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo—and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state. “See if you find one play that L.S.U. managed to run,” Pitino said. You couldn’t. The L.S.U. players struggled to get the ball inbounds, and, if they did that, they struggled to get the ball over mid-court, and on those occasions when they managed both those things they were too overwhelmed and exhausted to execute their offense the way they had been trained to. “We had eighty-six points at halftime,” Pitino went on—eighty-six points being, of course, what college basketball teams typically score in an entire game. “And I think we’d forced twenty-three turnovers at halftime,” twenty-three turnovers being what college basketball teams might force in two games. “I love watching this,” Pitino said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “Every day, you dream about getting a team like this again.” So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use the full-court press the way Pitino does?

Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures was endless. In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in “Violent Politics,” a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.

“I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,” Pitino said. Louisville was the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. “Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if they have the bench. They don’t know if the players can last.” Pitino shook his head. “We practice every day for two hours straight,” he went on. “The players are moving almost ninety-eight per cent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections”—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instruction—“they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.” Seven seconds! The coaches who came to Louisville sat in the stands and watched that ceaseless activity and despaired. The prospect of playing by David’s rules was too daunting. They would rather lose.

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.

This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.

T. E. Lawrence, by contrast, was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from Sandhurst. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. And David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

“In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,” Lenat said. “It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.”

It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.

The trouble for Redwood City started early in the regular season. The opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls, who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned something much more valuable—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.

“There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadivé said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.”

Roger Craig says that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs—‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.”

“My girls were all blond-haired white girls,” Ranadivé said. “My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because she’s half-Indian. One time, we were playing this all-black team from East San Jose. They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head: never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw him out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”

At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o’clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six, to beat the traffic. It was downhill from there. The referee did not believe in “One, two, three, attitude HAH.” He didn’t think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another.

“They were touch fouls,” Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful.

“My girls didn’t understand,” Ranadivé said. “The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team.”

“People were booing,” Craig said. “It was bad.”

“A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?” Ranadivé shook his head.

“One girl fouled out.”

“We didn’t get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But . . .”

Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end, and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. They did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and they lost—but not before making Goliath wonder whether he was a giant, after all. ♦

House on the hill is perfectly preserved in 1956

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/lifestyle/stories.nsf/homedecor/story/0A1933E4172E504E8625756F00052BF7?OpenDocument



WRITTEN BY AISHA SULTAN - HOME AND FAMILY ; PHOTOS BY ELIE GARDNER ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Friday, Mar. 06 2009

The Formenti boys grew up in a basement with concrete floors, an old slop sink and an exposed ceiling. Up a short flight of stairs, there was a spotless white kitchen, thick wool carpeting and a fully furnished two-bedroom home. But their parents had decided it was just too lavish for the family's everyday living. "Mostly, mom just wanted to keep everything nice for company," said Drew Formenti, 44, of St. Louis.

The modest, frame house from the 1950s, set in a row of tract houses in the Hill neighborhood, is a perfectly preserved relic of a bygone era. When the grown boys recently decided it was time to move their father into an assisted living home, they put their childhood house on the market.

The first real estate agent advised clearing out the bungalow, updating the kitchen and bathroom and getting rid of the dated draperies. But real estate agent Christopher Thiemet ended up with the listing and said its throwback style would be its selling point.

Perhaps in reaction to the current consumption culture, there is a growing desire for the workmanship and sustainability of the past. Retro is the new green living.

The "time capsule home" drew a cult following on various websites, and the boys who grew up in its basement decided to open the doors to those wanting to peek into the past.

Walking into the '50s

Elvis made his debut on national television, and "I Love Lucy" was one of the country's favorite programs. Families would gather to watch Edward R. Murrow deliver news on a black-and-white set.

But at 2204 Stephen Drive, the television set was largely off-limits.

The white Republic Steel cabinets stored company china and silverware. The Formica laminate countertop unused. A black, rotary dial phone hung on the kitchen wall. The original Magic Chef stove had been used exactly 28 times to cook 28 Thanksgiving turkeys. The rest of the meals were cooked in the basement.

On Christmas mornings, the three boys and their parents would venture into the formal living room. They would walk only on the patchwork carpet samples laid like hopscotch squares on top of the pristine carpeting. The furniture was covered in plastic, and the lampshades still had their original inventory tags hanging on the inside.

They would wait for Uncle Herman and Aunt Mary, the relatives who had helped their parents buy the house in 1956 for $15,000. It was one of the few times a year the family would sit together upstairs. And as soon as the company left, they moved back to the 1,000-square-foot basement.

It was not such an usual living arrangment for first-generation immigrant families back then, who wanted to keep their newly acquired piece of the American Dream as shiny and new as possible. Frank Formenti immigrated to St. Louis from Italy, and Elizabeth Bergroschtje had come from Germany. Her family was originally from Yugoslavia and ended up in a concentration camp during World War II. She lost her brother and mother in the camp, and Elizabeth came to the U.S. in her mid-20s alone.
She met Frank in an English class in St. Louis. They married, moved into the house on the Hill and raised three boys there.

There isn't a scratch, nick or dent on any of the furniture or wood floors. "We just didn't know any better," said Dave Formenti, 50, of Ballwin. "We knew we shouldn't be upstairs."

They didn't have their own rooms downstairs, just large metal desks for each of them and clothing rods to hang their clothes. They were allowed to sleep in their upstairs bedrooms at night, and in the winters they could bathe in the pink-and-gray mosaic tiled "company" bathroom.

When Pam Kueber, who writes a retro renovations blog out of her Lennox, Mass., home, heard about the house, she posted the information on her website and helped organize a home tour for local mid-century enthusiasts.

"The house is so special, we wanted to see it first-hand," she wrote in an e-mail. "We call these 'time capsule' homes and love to study their every detail so that we can replicate or restore them in our own mid-century homes."

She says interest in these types of home is increasing. She also launched a site devoted to saving pink bathrooms, which new owners may be tempted to gut and update. Web traffic to her sites has doubled in the past four months.

The tour Linda Sass lives in a University City home built in 1917 and still uses a 1958 Thermador.

She was one of a dozen people who showed up for the tour and was amazed by the care that went into perserving the home.
She says she is drawn to the quality and care that went into the building and furniture from that time period.

"Every purchase was a deliberate purchase. There was a lot of thought to form and function."

Another visitor explained her attraction to the house: "It's from an era of the '50s wife, the post-war, surreal happiness. It makes me smile to see things from the '50s," said Michelle Kodner, 42, a corporate trainer who runs a fan site for midcentury modern treasures in St. Louis.

Thiemet, of Circa Properties, pointed out that aluminum had been taped over the window frames, so the sun would not bake and warp the wood. When he saw the house, he was moved by the devotion to maintaining something that had been so simple, "so unispired" in its time.

He loved that Elizabeth appreciated it like she did.

The house actually sold for the list price — $129,900 — the day before it was entered into MLS listings. Thiemet showed a buyer the home before it officially went on the market. The buyer wanted to buy it "as is" furniture included (which he got). And even asked if he could have the clothes hanging in the closets (which he didn't get).

The visitors on the tour took off their shoes at the entry to protect the spotless carpet.

Dave Formenti says he has other friends who remember growing up in basements for the same reasons. It seemed normal back then. But when he gave the tour upstairs, Dave kept his shoes on.

Seeing color in sounds has genetic link

* Story Highlights
* Synesthesia is a condition in which people experience a mixing of their senses
* A new study suggests a genetic underpinning to the condition
* Awareness is growing, but many people do not know about it

By Elizabeth Landau
CNN

(CNN) -- When Julian Asher listens to an orchestra, he doesn't just hear music; he also sees it. The sounds of a violin make him see a rich burgundy color, shiny and fluid like a red wine, while a cello's music flows like honey in a golden yellow hue.

Asher, a researcher in the department of genomic medicine at Imperial College London, has a rare condition called synesthesia, a neurological condition in which people experience a mixing of their senses. People with the condition may see colors and movement in numbers, words or sounds.

As many as 1 percent of people have the most recognizable form of synesthesia, studies say. Acclaimed Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote "Lolita," famously had the disorder, as did physicist Richard Feynman and composer Franz Liszt.

"Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl," Nabokov wrote in his memoir "Speak, Memory."

Psychologists have known for more than a century that synesthesia runs in families -- Nabokov's mother and son Dimitri also displayed forms of it -- but the specific genes have not been found.

Now, Asher and colleagues in the United Kingdom have done what they say is the first genetic analysis of synesthesia. Their findings are published this week in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Researchers collected DNA from 196 people from 43 families in which there were multiple members with synesthesia. They looked exclusively at auditory-visual synesthesia, the kind where sound triggers color, which is easier to diagnose than other possible forms. Visit CNNhealth.com, your connection for better living

They expected to find a single gene responsible for synesthesia, but they found that the condition was linked to regions on chromosomes 2, 5, 6, and 12 -- four distinct areas instead of one.

"It means that the genetics of synesthesia are much more complex than we thought," Asher said.

Brain scans have shown that people with synesthesia seem to have "cross-wiring" between brain regions, said Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.

"Nobody really had the evidence pinning it down to specific genes in specific chromosomes, and I'm delighted to hear somebody's done that," Ramachandran said.

"Cross-wiring" was shown in a study led by J.A. Nunn at Goldsmiths College, London, which found that the visual areas of the brain were activated in response to sound in people for whom sound triggers color.

Given that a normal infant's brain has excess connections between brain regions, one hypothesis is that synesthesia results when the genes that "prune" these connections away are mutated, Ramachandran said. In other words, people with synesthesia may have brain connections that would normally disappear at an early age.

Genes found in the areas of Asher's study have been connected to other mental disorders. For example, genes on chromosome 2 have also been linked to autism, Asher said.

The link between synesthesia and autism is controversial and speculative, but one of Asher's previous case studies suggests a connection. The man he examined had Asperger's syndrome -- a mild, high-functioning form of autism -- and also had an extraordinary memory capacity for numbers. In fact, he memorized 22,000 digits of the number pi.

The man's process of remembering these numbers is not simple rote recall. Instead, it is as though he were navigating a landscape, Asher said. "He says it's like walking along a path," Asher said.

The man's ability to focus intently on a dry subject is associated with Asperger's, but it's also synesthesia that helps him memorize numbers, Asher said. In fact, in this sense, synesthesia is a form of photographic memory.

One suggestion is that synesthesia and autism in a single person may make him or her a savant, someone with a singular and extreme intellectual ability.

Children with synesthesia will often show signs of it in school, because it slows down reading for some kids and makes lectures difficult to absorb for others. As awareness of learning differences grows in schools, more children are coming forward and explaining that they have trouble, leading to more diagnoses, Asher said. Interventions may include written notes or books on tape for those whose synesthesia interferes with, respectively, listening or reading.

To what extent do children with synesthesia grow up to become artists and poets? The connection is controversial, in spite of prominent examples such as Nabokov, Asher said it's a misconception that most synesthetes go into creative disciplines. His database of 900 people with the condition does not have a disproportionate number in artistic professions.

In Asher's own case, nonverbal noises such as a fire alarm or a piece of music will trigger visual sensations.

When he was a child, Asher would go to the symphony with his parents and assumed that the lights went down so that everyone could see the colors better. "I mean, why else would they do it?" he said.

"My parents asked something, and I said, 'Oh, they turned the lights off so you could see the colors,' and they had no idea what I was talking about, and that's when I realized that they didn't see what I saw," he said.

He never knew that his condition had a name until he happened to be researching the genetics of perfect pitch, which has been anecdotally linked with synesthesia.

"Even to this day, I'll run into people who study neuroscience for a living, and they've never heard of it," he said. There are organizations that promote awareness, but still a lot of people don't know about it, he said.

Scientists have new clue to mystery of sunken sub

As a fan of Clive Cussler, the Civil War, and treasure hunting, the story of the Hunley is fascinating on many levels to me... Aiming4.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081017/ap_on_re_us/confederate_submarine

By BRUCE SMITH, Associated Press Writer Bruce Smith, Associated Press Writer Fri Oct 17, 7:25 pm ET

CHARLESTON, S.C. – It's long been a mystery why the H.L. Hunley never returned after becoming the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship in 1864, but new research announced Friday may lend credence to one of the theories. Scientists found the eight-man crew of the hand-cranked Confederate submarine had not set the pump to remove water from the crew compartment, which might indicate it was not being flooded.

That could mean crew members suffocated as they used up air, perhaps while waiting for the tide to turn and the current to help take them back to land.

The new evidence disputes the notion that the Hunley was damaged and took on water after ramming a spar with a charge of black powder into the Union blockade ship Housatonic.

Scientists studying the sub said they've found its pump system was not set to remove water from the crew compartment as might be expected if it were being flooded.

The sub, located in 1995 and raised five years later, had a complex pumping system that could be switched to remove water or operate ballast tanks used to submerge and surface.

"It now really starts to point to a lack of oxygen making them unconscious," said state Sen. Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston and the chairman of the South Carolina Hunley Commission, formed to raise, conserve and display the sub. "They may have been cranking and moving and it was a miscalculation as to how much oxygen they had."

In excavating the sub, scientists found little intermingling of the crew remains, indicating members died at their stations. Those bones likely would have been jumbled if the crew tried to make it to the hatches in a desperate attempt to get out.

"Whatever occurred, occurred quickly and unexpectedly," McConnell said. "It appears they were either unconscious because of the concussion (from the attack) or they were unconscious because of a lack of oxygen."

Archaeologist Maria Jacobsen cautioned that scientists have not yet examined all the valves to see if the crew may have been trying to surface by using the pumps to jettison ballast.

"Can we definitely say they weren't pumping like mad to get water out of the tanks? No we cannot," she said. "I'm not really at a point where I think we should really be talking about what these guys were doing at the very end because we simply don't know all the valve settings."

But she said scientists can definitely say the valve that would have been used to remove water from the crew compartment was closed.

Guess Who???

The program will guess anyone you think of!
See for yourself. Pretty cute stuff!!!
(can be outsmarted though)

http://www.devinettor.com/

Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2284349.ece

From The Sunday TimesAugust 19, 2007

Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world

Image :1 of 3

A MIRACLE material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars.

Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.

Scientists are working to discover new applications for the substance, ranging from the next generation of tennis rackets to super-insulated space suits for a manned mission to Mars.

It is expected to rank alongside wonder products from previous generations such as Bakelite in the 1930s, carbon fibre in the 1980s and silicone in the 1990s. Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: “It is an amazing material. It has the lowest density of any product known to man, yet at the same time it can do so much. I can see aerogel being used for everything from filtering polluted water to insulating against extreme temperatures and even for jewellery.”

Aerogel is nicknamed “frozen smoke” and is made by extracting water from a silica gel, then replacing it with gas such as carbon dioxide. The result is a substance that is capable of insulating against extreme temperatures and of absorbing pollutants such as crude oil.

It was invented by an American chemist for a bet in 1931, but early versions were so brittle and costly that it was largely consigned to laboratories. It was not until a decade ago that Nasa started taking an interest in the substance and putting it to a more practical use.

In 1999 the space agency fitted its Stardust space probe with a mitt packed full of aerogel to catch the dust from a comet’s tail. It returned with a rich collection of samples last year.

In 2002 Aspen Aerogel, a company created by Nasa, produced a stronger and more flexible version of the gel. It is now being used to develop an insulated lining in space suits for the first manned mission to Mars, scheduled for 2018.

Mark Krajewski, a senior scientist at the company, believes that an 18mm layer of aerogel will be sufficient to protect astronauts from temperatures as low as -130C. “It is the greatest insulator we’ve ever seen,” he said.

Aerogel is also being tested for future bombproof housing and armour for military vehicles. In the laboratory, a metal plate coated in 6mm of aerogel was left almost unscathed by a direct dynamite blast.

It also has green credentials. Aerogel is described by scientists as the “ultimate sponge”, with millions of tiny pores on its surface making it ideal for absorbing pollutants in water.

Kanatzidis has created a new version of aerogel designed to mop up lead and mercury from water. Other versions are designed to absorb oil spills.

He is optimistic that it could be used to deal with environmental catastrophes such as the Sea Empress spillage in 1996, when 72,000 tons of crude oil were released off the coast of Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire.

Aerogel is also being used for everyday applications. Dunlop, the sports equipment company, has developed a range of squash and tennis rackets strengthened with aerogel, which are said to deliver more power.

Earlier this year Bob Stoker, 66, from Nottingham, became the first Briton to have his property insulated with aerogel. “The heating has improved significantly. I turned the thermostat down five degrees. It’s been a remarkable transformation,” he said.

Mountain climbers are also converts. Last year Anne Parmenter, a British mountaineer, climbed Everest using boots that had aerogel insoles, as well as sleeping bags padded with the material. She said at the time: “The only problem I had was that my feet were too hot, which is a great problem to have as a mountaineer.”

However, it has failed to convince the fashion world. Hugo Boss created a line of winter jackets out of the material but had to withdraw them after complaints that they were too hot.

Although aerogel is classed as a solid, 99% of the substance is made up of gas, which gives it a cloudy appearance.

Scientists say that because it has so many millions of pores and ridges, if one cubic centimetre of aerogel were unravelled it would fill an area the size of a football field.

Its nano-sized pores can not only collect pollutants like a sponge but they also act as air pockets.

Researchers believe that some versions of aerogel which are made from platinum can be used to speed up the production of hydrogen. As a result, aerogel can be used to make hydrogen-based fuels.

What Happens When We Die?

Thursday, Sep. 18, 2008
What Happens When We Die?
By M.J. Stephey

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1842627,00.html?cnn=yes

A fellow at New York's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week, Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S., and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics, and the difference between the mind and the brain.

What sort of methods will this project use to try and verify people's claims of "near-death" experience?

When your heart stops beating, there is no blood getting to your brain. And so what happens is that within about ten seconds, brain activity ceases —as you would imagine. Yet paradoxically, ten or 20 percent of people who are then brought back to life from that period, which may be a few minutes or over an hour, will report having consciousness. So the key thing here is, are these real, or is it some sort of illusion? So the only way to tell is to have pictures only visible from the ceiling and nowhere else, because they claim they can see everything from the ceiling. So if we then get a series of 200 or 300 people who all were clinically dead, and yet they're able to come back and tell us what we were doing and were able see those pictures, that confirms consciousness really was continuing even though the brain wasn't functioning.

How does this project relate to society's perception of death?

People commonly perceive death as being a moment — you're either dead or you're alive. And that's a social definition we have. But the clinical definition we use is when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working, and as a consequence the brain itself stops working. When doctors shine a light into someone's pupil, it's to demonstrate that there is no reflex present. The eye reflex is mediated by the brain stem and that's the area that keeps us alive; if that doesn't work then that means that the brain itself isn't working. At that point, I'll call a nurse into the room so I can certify that this patient is dead. Fifty years ago, people couldn't survive after that.

How is technology challenging the perception that death is a moment?

Nowadays, we have technology that's improved so that we can bring people back to life. In fact, there are drugs being developed right now — who knows if they'll ever make it to the market — that may actually slow down the process of brain-cell injury and death. Imagine, you fast-forward to ten years down the line and you've given a patient whose heart has just stopped this amazing drug, and actually what it does is it slows everything down so that the things that would've happened over an hour, now happen over two days. As medicine progresses, we will end up with lots and lots of ethical questions.

But what is happening to the individual at that time, what's really going on? Because there is a lack of blood flow, the cells go into a kind of a frenzy to keep themselves alive. And within about 5 minutes or so they start to damage or change. After an hour or so the damage is so great that even if we restart the heart again and pump blood, the person can no longer be viable because the cells have just been changed too much. And then the cells continue to change so that within a couple of days the body actually decomposes. So it's not a moment, it's a process that actually begins when the heart stops and culminates in the complete loss of the body, the decompositions of all the cells. However, ultimately what matters is, What's going on to a person's mind? What happens to the human mind and consciousness during death? Does that cease immediately as soon as the heart stops? Does it cease activity within the first 2 seconds, the first 2 minutes? Because we know that cells are continuously changing at that time. Does it stop after ten minutes, after half an hour, after an hour? And at this point we don't know.

What was your first interview like with someone who had reported an out-of-body experience?

Eye-opening and very humbling. Because what you see is that, first of all, they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or attention. In many cases they haven't even told anybody else about it because they're afraid of what people will think of them. I have about five hundred or so cases of people that I've interviewed since I first started out more than ten years ago. It's the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what they were describing. I managed to speak to doctors and nurses who had been present who said these patients had told them exactly what had happened and they couldn't explain it. I actually documented a few of those in my book What Happens When We Die because I wanted people to get both angles —not just the patients' side but also get the doctors' side — and see how it feels for the doctors to have a patient come back and tell them what was going on. There was a cardiologist that I spoke with who said he hasn't told anyone else about it because he has no explanation for how this patient could have been able to describe in detail what he had said and done. He was so freaked out by it that he just decided not to think about it anymore.

Why do you think there is such resistance to studies like yours?

Because we're pushing through the boundaries of science, working against assumptions and perceptions that have been fixed. A lot of people hold this idea that well, when you die you die, that's it. Death is a moment, you know you're either dead or you're alive. All these things are not scientifically valid but they're social perceptions. If you look back at the end of the 19th century, physicists at that time had been working with Newtonian laws of motion and they really felt they had all the answers to everything that was out there in the universe. When we look at the world around us, Newtonian physics is perfectly sufficient. It explains most things that we deal with. But then it was discovered that actually when you look at motion at really small levels —beyond the level of the atoms — Newton's laws no longer apply. A new physics was needed, hence, we eventually ended up with quantum physics. It caused a lot of controversy, even Einstein himself didn't believe in it.

Now, if you look at the mind, consciousness, and the brain, the assumption that the mind and brain are the same thing is fine for most circumstances, because in 99% of circumstances we can't separate the mind and brain, they work at the exactly the same time. But then there are certain extreme examples, like when the brain shuts down, that we see that that this assumption may no longer seem to hold true. So a new science is needed in the same way that we had to have a new quantum physics. The CERN particle accelerator may take us back to our roots. It may take us back to the first moments after the big bang, the very beginning. With our study, for the first time, we have the technology and the means to be able to investigate this. To see what happens at the end for us. Does something continue?

Geography: Discover some of the most beautiful
places in the World.

http://www.alovelyworld.com/index2.html

(Israel is not featured directly, however it can be
seen when you press Jordan, Syria or Lebanon)

Dubi

'Humans, bees share risk-taking mechanism'
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH

When presented with the chance for a big reward from a risky endeavor, people and honeybees use the same mechanism to decide, according to researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University. Their research on "perceptual accuracy and conflicting effects of certainty on risk-taking behavior" has just been published in the prestigious journal Nature.

The researchers discovered that people are more prepared to gamble on risky action rather when the differences between the various possible outcomes are well defined. However, if the different outcomes are hard to distinguish, they are much more likely to select a safe option, even if the probability of the risky choice failing has not changed at all.

The findings are relevant to how people decide to invest in the stock market, how to gamble, whom to marry, where to work, whether to remain honest or commit crimes, and to many other life decisions.

Profs. Ido Erev of the Technion's industrial engineering and management faculty, Arnon Lotem of TAU, Sharoni Shafir of HU's agricultural, food and environmental quality sciences faculty and their colleagues wanted to understand the "certainty effect" and the "reversed certainty effect" that in previous studies showed opposite tendencies in humans and rats.

Sometimes people are no smarter in their decision-making than rats. At least, so it seemed from a paper shown to Lotem, a zoologist, by his colleague and co-author, Erev, an industrial engineer. Lotem wondered why this might be.

The paper reported on the "certainty effect," which refers to the tendency for people to select the safer of two prospects when it provides a good and certain outcome. The "reversed certainty effect" refers to the reduced tendency to prefer the safer option when this prospect is associated with certainty. The researchers managed to restore the certainty effect in experiments on both humans - 50 undergraduates offered money for making choices in the form of a cluster of red dots or numerical digits on a computer screen - and honeybees offered sugar solutions of different concentrations.

In previous research, when rats were repeatedly faced with the option of receiving either a bigger reward infrequently or a smaller reward with certainty, they preferred the safer option - even though it was less profitable on average. Thus the insects behaved like people did when the payoff odds of choosing two alternatives are described to them verbally.

However, Erev's group had found that if humans are faced with the same situation as the rats - that is, the pay-off probabilities are not explained to them - they behave differently. On a "computerized money machine," people repeatedly display the "reverse certainty effect" by gravitating toward the bigger payoff, even though it is statistically less likely. The research team decided to find out what hid behind this difference in behavior. They discovered that both humans and other animals can exhibit certainty or reverse certainty depending on the cues available to them.

Because humans can perceive the precise amount of a reward from reading numbers, while rats must rely on their senses to make estimates, the researchers suspected that perceptual accuracy was the key to solving this paradox. They started by devising a series of experimental scenarios that manipulate the clarity of reward cues, and then tried them out on both honeybees and humans.

In one experiment, the student volunteers had a choice of two computer buttons, one marked 'R' (for risky) and the other marked 'S' (for safe). Pushing S resulted in a payoff of three points with absolute certainty, while pushing R resulted to a payoff of four points in eight out of 10 tries. But the students did not know what the letters stood for and learned about how likely they were to earn the rewards only by trial and error as they flashed on screen.

Watching people push buttons seemingly at random was enlightening, Lotem said. "In theory, people could have been very smart and pressed one button 20 times and pressed another button 20 times, and, like a scientist, figured out the average. But people don't behave like statisticians."

Instead, subjects tried both buttons and developed a preference for the button perceived as better "most of the time." However, when payoffs were represented by the visual display of scattered dots rather than through clear numerical means, making it more difficult to tell which was better, people preferred the safer button. In other words, they exhibited the certainty effect, like the rats in the study that first piqued Lotem's interest.

In the other part of the experiment, the honeybees that were rewarded with sugary solutions of varying concentration surprisingly behaved like people, preferring the risky option when discrimination between rewards was easy, and the safe option when discrimination was difficult.

"Honeybees can't count," noted Lotem. "But, if you give them a high concentration of sugar or if they get none, they remember."

Like humans, the bees behaved as though they preferred the option perceived as better most of the time.

They concluded from their research that people and bees use the same decision-making mechanism and make the same mistakes when they have to decide between a sure reward and a bigger, but riskier reward.

Lotem and his colleagues wondered how their findings might apply to real-world situations.

"In the real world, rewards may frequently be ambiguous, and you never know when conditions are going to change," said Lotem. "So perhaps the tendency to explore both options and to prefer the one perceived as better most of the time is a good strategy."


http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1212659715349&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

>…only one regular reader got the essence of it and replied: "That could be a useful side effect if it erases memory of whom you had sex with."<

A regular reader, heheh

Here's another one for you Dubi. I've posted this on a scientific board but i'm afraid only one regular reader got the essence of it and replied: "That could be a useful side effect if it erases memory of whom you had sex with." I answered: "That could explain why you guys always want more."

Brief Amnesia After Taking Levitra?

http://www.webmd.com/erectile-dysfunction/news/20080530/amnesia-added-to-levitra-label

Erectile Dysfunction Drug Levitra to Get Label Change Noting Rare Reports of Transient Global Amnesia

By Miranda Hitti WebMD Health News Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

May 29, 2008 -- The erectile dysfunction drug Levitra is getting a label change noting rare reports of transient global amnesia in men taking the drug.

Transient global amnesia, or TGA, is a brief bout of amnesia, not lasting longer than a day, without causing other problems.

Levitra's label change isn't a warning or a precaution, and it doesn't mean that the drug causes memory problems. The reported cases of transient global amnesia in men taking Levitra may have been spurred by something else, even by sex.

"Sex can trigger TGA," says Harvard neurology professor Louis R. Caplan, MD. He likens TGA to a tape recorder that's not working.

"People otherwise can walk and talk and read and do high-level things, but they're not recording the information, as if their tape recorder is off," Caplan explains.

Transient global amnesia "scares people" but it doesn't affect function, long-term memory, or other aspects of health, Caplan says. "It isn't a reason not to take the drug."

Still, men who experience transient global amnesia should see a doctor to rule out illness or injury, says Caplan, who is also an attending physician in the Comprehensive Center for Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Not a "Warning" or "Precaution"

Transient global amnesia will join a list of other rare, reported adverse events -- including vision problems and sudden hearing loss, which are noted for all ED drugs [I thought all men have these phenomena especially when asked to help around with the house maintenance and kids.] -- in the "Post-Marketing" section of Levitra's label.
Levitra's label got the transient global amnesia note "because of a limited number of post-marketing reports of men who experienced TGA" around the time they took Levitra, the FDA tells WebMD in an email.

But those reports don't prove that Levitra was to blame.

Bayer Pharmaceuticals and the FDA have agreed on the wording of Levitra's label change, Bayer Pharmaceuticals spokesman Mark C. Burnett tells WebMD by email. Bayer "constantly monitors product safety reports and works closely together with worldwide regulatory authorities, including the FDA, to ensure that appropriate product information is shared with physicians and with their patients," Burnett says.
Transient Global Amnesia and ED Drugs

Caplan, a transient global amnesia expert, has seen many TGA patients, but only one man who had TGA after taking an ED drug.

The patient, a 51-year-old man with a history of hypertension and migraines, had played golf in the morning. After returning home with his girlfriend, he took Viagra.

"After 30 minutes, as he was about to engage in sexual intercourse, the patient reported that he 'felt weird'... [and] could not remember that he had played golf that morning," Caplan and colleagues wrote in Neurology's Sept. 10, 2002, issue.

The man was hospitalized for a day. His memory gradually improved during that time, though he hadn't regained his lost memories when he was discharged from the hospital.

Few other cases of transient global amnesia in men taking ED drugs have been published in medical journals. Those cases include a German man who experienced TGA after he apparently took Cialis, his doctors wrote in the International Journal of Impotence Research's July/August 2005 issue.

None of the case reports confirm that ED drugs prompted transient global amnesia.
Cialis, Viagra: No Label Changes

The three erectile dysfunction drugs -- Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra -- belong to a class of drugs called phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE-5) inhibitors. None has been shown to cause transient global amnesia.

Only Levitra is changing its label to note reports of transient global amnesia. The FDA tells WebMD it can't comment on whether the makers of Cialis and Viagra have been asked to make similar label changes.

Pfizer makes Viagra. "We can't really speculate whether the Viagra label will be updated, but we certainly do believe that the current label accurately reflects the safety and efficacy of Viagra," Pfizer spokeswoman Jennifer Jacob tells WebMD in an email.

Eli Lilly & Co. makes Cialis. "Lilly typically doesn't discuss potential label changes or regulatory action," Stephanie Kenney-Andrzejewski, senior vice president for communications firm MS&L Global Health, tells WebMD on behalf of Lilly in an email. Kenney adds that "Cialis continues to be a generally well-tolerated and effective treatment for ED," with a safety profile backed by clinical research in more than 16,000 patients and more than 11.5 million men worldwide who have been prescribed Cialis.

Israeli scientists create the first smell map
By ISRAEL21c staff
May 29, 2008

Scientists are one step closer to understanding the complexity of smell, after a new report by Israeli researchers has shown that smells can be mapped, and the relative distance between odors determined.

Smell is a complex and still little-understood sense. Odor molecules are far more difficult to pin down than sound frequencies. We know that the musical note, "do," is farther from "la," than "re," on a scale because the frequencies are further apart and our ears can identify the difference. Until now, there was no similar physical relationship discovered for smells and it was impossible to know if the smell of almonds, for example, was closer to that of roses or bananas.

The researchers at Weizmann Institute of Technology collected together 250 odorants, and for each of these generated a list of about 1,600 chemical characteristics. From this dataset, the researchers, led by Rafi Haddad, a graduate student with Prof. Noam Sobel in the Neurobiology Department, and Prof. David Harel of the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department, together with their colleague Rehan Khan, created a multidimensional map of smells that revealed the distance between one odor molecule and another.

The researchers pared down the list of traits needed to situate an odor on the map down to around 40. They then checked to see whether the brain recognizes this map, much as it would recognize musical scales.

They reexamined numerous previously published studies that measured the neural response patterns to smells in a variety of lab animals - from fruit flies to rats - and found that across all the species, the closer any two smells were on the map, the more similar the neural patterns.

The scientists also tested 70 new odors by predicting the neural patterns they would arouse, and ran comparisons with the unpublished results of olfaction experiments done at the University of Tokyo in Japan. The Israeli researchers found that their predictions closely matched the experimental results.

These findings, which were published recently in Nature Methods, lend support to the scientists' theory that, contrary to the commonly held view that smell is a subjective experience, there are universal laws governing the organization of smells, and these laws determine how our brains perceive them.

The research could help scientists unravel the basic laws governing our sense of smell, as well as potentially enabling odors to be digitized and transferred via computer in the future.

In September last year, Sobel and colleagues at the University of California announced that they had discovered a link between the molecular structure of a substance and whether it smells good or bad. This was the first time a known physical factor was discovered that could explain how our brains sense odors.

http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enDispWho=Articles%5El2133&enPage=BlankPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enVersion=0&enZone=Democracy&

Thanks Jerry, I'll definitely check it out.

I've received a lot of "on the job" training with my COR investment.

Neat information huh?.........I see you like pharms, I am in the process of creating a board for an interesting little company.........but with a huge product if they get this approved by the FDA after the clinicals this will change things for those suffering with glaucoma in a big big way. I don't know how the stock will trade between now and then of course but one to keep and eye on for sure. I shoud have it up after I have some coffee, or in about 10 minutes. Its on the cheap side right now.

Jerry

makesumgravy - thanks, I was particularly intrigued by the companies that do and don't buy from the Middle East.

I will do some more reading on that.

Subject: GAS saving tips and deciding who gets the money you spend on gas
This is really interesting. Take the time to read it all the way through....
TIPS ON PUMPING GAS & SAVING MONEY:

I don't know what you guys are paying for gasoline.... but here in California we are currently paying as much as $3.50 per gallon. But my line of work is in petroleum, for about 31 years now, so here are some tricks to get more of your money's worth for every gallon..

Here at the Kinder Morgan Pipeline where I work in San Jose, CA we deliver about 4 million gallons in a 24-hour period thru the pipeline. One day is diesel the next day is jet fuel, and gasoline, regular and premium grades. We have 34-storage tanks with a total capacity of 16,800,000 gallons.

Only buy or fill up yo ur car in the early morning when the ground temperatu re is still cold since all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or evening your gallon is not exactly a gallon. In the petroleum business, the specific gravity and the temperature of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role.

A 1-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for this business. But the service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps.

When you're filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode. If you look you will see that the tr igger has three (3)stages: low, middle, and high. In slow mode you should be pumping on low speed, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some other liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you're getting less worth for your money.

One of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is HALF EMPTY. The reason for this is, the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation. Unlike service stations, here where I work, every truck that we load is temperature compensated so that every gallon i s actually the exact amount.

Another rem inder, if there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, DO NOT fill up--most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some of the dirt that normally settles on the bottom. Hope this will help you get the most value for your money.

DO SHARE THESE TIPS WITH OTHERS!

WHERE TO BUY GAS, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO KNOW.
READ ON. . .

Gas rationing in the 80's worked even though we grumbled about it. It might even be good for us! The Saudis are boycotting American goods. We should return the favor.

An interesting thought is to boycott their GAS.

Every time you fill up the car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia. Just buy from gas companies that don't import their oil from the Saudis.

Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends.

I thought it might be interesting for you to know which oil companies are the b est to buy gas from and which major companies import Middle Eastern oil.

These companies import Middle Eastern oil:
Shell........................... 205,742,000 barrels

Chevron/Texaco......... 144,332,000 barrels

Exxon /Mobil............... 130,082,000 barrels

Marathon/Speedway... 117,740,000 barrels

Amoco............................62,231,000 barrels

Citgo gas is from South America, from a Dictator who hates Americans. If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to over $18 BILLION! (oil is now $90 - $100 a barrel)

Here are some large companies that do not import Middle Eastern oil:

Sunoco..................0 barrels

Conoco..................0 barrels

Sinclair..................0 barrels

BP/Phillips............0 barre ls

Hess......................0 barrels

ARC0....................0 barrels

If you go to Sunoco.com <http://sunoco.com/> , you will get a list of the station locations near you.

All o f this information is available from the Department of Energy and each company is required to state where they get their oil and how much they are importing.

But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of gas buyers. It's really simple to do.

Now, don't wimp out at this point.... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I'm sending this note to about thirty people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)...and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) .. and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reac hed over THREE MILLION consumers !!!!!!! If those three million get excite d and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted.

If it goes one level further, you guessed it ..... THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. How long would all that take?

Baseball at breaking point over maple bats

By Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports May 9, 2:26 am EDT

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=Ar.EtbgFYtrs5gbxruwfjxc5nYcB?slug=jp-maplebats050808&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

Someone’s going to die at a baseball stadium soon.

Might be a player. Could be an umpire. Possibly even a fan.

It almost was a coach.

The scar on Don Long’s left cheek still puffs around the edges, fresh enough that it looks like a misplaced zipper instead of the mark of someone who lived too hard. Like every scar, this one has a story, and it involves a piece of shattered wood, about two pounds heavy, that tomahawked 30 feet before slicing through his face.

Nate McLouth thought he just missed the sweet spot of the bat. It was April 15, the eighth inning, and the Pittsburgh Pirates were getting pummeled at Dodger Stadium. Long, the Pirates’ hitting coach, milled about the dugout until he heard McLouth hammer Esteban Loaiza’s 0-2 pitch. Long looked up and tracked the ball down the right-field line. He had no idea baseball’s greatest weapon was headed right at him, and that had he been positioned an inch to the left or right, he might not be here to talk about it.

About two or three times a game. players swinging bats made of maple wood end up with kindling in their hands while the barrel – blunt and thick on one end, splintered and sharp on the other – flies every which direction. Pitchers and middle infielders stand in the greatest line of fire and do their best acrobat imitations to avoid the remnants. On occasion, the shard will land in the stands and harm a fan. And sometimes, as it did in the case of Long, it will wind up in the dugout.

“Didn’t see it at all,” Long said. “It just hit me. I backed up. I saw the blood coming out on the card I keep and on my shoes.”

The Pirates’ training staff rushed Long into the clubhouse to stop the bleeding. The bat sliced through the muscle in his cheek, catching nerves in its wake. A piece broke off and lodged under his skin. A doctor needed to remove the stray wood before he could sew 10 stitches.

When McLouth ended up on second base, he wondered why so many people were scurrying around the dugout. He ran to first with three inches of wood in his hands. He couldn’t find the other 30 or so, when it occurred to him: the ruckus was over his bat, the maple that was barely seen in baseball before 2001, when Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs using one. Now, about 50 percent of players use maple.

“They’re great,” McLouth said, “except for that.”

The incidents keep happening, and following Mike Coolbaugh’s death last season when a batted ball struck him in the neck while he was coaching first base in a minor league game, neither Major League Baseball nor the MLB Players Association can afford to wait for another tragedy when it could take preventative measures. Were officials from either party to meet with Long and see his face, they would understand the issue must be resolved immediately.

“When I blow my nose out of this side,” Long said, “I have to look in the mirror and make sure nothing’s hanging there because I can’t really feel what’s happening.

“Could’ve been a lot worse. Could’ve hit me in the eye.”

Long tried to smile. The right side of his mouth perked up. The left side didn’t move.

In 2005, alarmed by the increasing number of broken bats, baseball gave $109,000 to a man named Jim Sherwood and asked him to compare maple bats with the ash ones that used to be the norm. Sherwood runs the Baseball Research Center at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and the conclusion of the study did not jibe with the hundreds of players who swear maple leads to better performance.

“We found that the batted-ball speeds were essentially the same for the two woods,” Sherwood said. “Maple has no advantage in getting a longer hit over an ash bat.”

The study also found something evident to anyone watching baseball: Ash bats crack while maple bats snap.

Even so, something about the maple bats caused a frenzy. Sam Holman, who started the Original Maple Bat company out of Canada to give players an alternative to the softer ash, supplied Bonds with his first maple in 1999. Word spread, and soon Sam Bats, as they’re called, showed up across baseball. Chuck Schupp, the director of professional sales at Hillerich & Bradsby, the parent company for Louisville Slugger, saw the abundance of Sam Bats in clubhouses and urged his company to join the maple fray. More than 20 bat makers now are licensed to sell maple bats for about $65 a pop, compared to $45 for ash bats, and the demand isn’t lessening.

“I feel like they’re harder,” McLouth said. “Whether or not that’s scientifically true, I’m not sure. But psychologically, I feel like they are.”

Players love their bats irrationally. Ichiro Suzuki keeps his in a silver case. Kosuke Fukudome weighs his to the gram. Jeff Cirillo slept with his. Some talk to them, kiss them, massage them. Anything to keep them happy.

So when in 2006 MLB broached the issue of maple bats during the collective-bargaining negotiations, it did not go well. The union wasn’t receptive to a unilateral ban and didn’t budge at the thought of at least imposing specifications to lessen the likelihood of breakage.

MLB scoffed at putting nets in front of the seats closest to the field, as the NHL did after a stray puck struck and killed 13-year-old Brittanie Cecil. The discussions went nowhere quickly, and it ended with them agreeing to table the issue until a later date. Both sides spent the next year focusing on the Mitchell Report, and only after the Long incident did they revisit it.

“We have provisions in the agreement,” union leader Don Fehr said Thursday by phone. “There will be a committee that will be put together and meet on it. We’ll look at it in good faith.”

Said Rob Manfred, MLB’s lead labor counsel, in a statement through a spokesman: “Baseball is aware of the bat issue. We have done scientific research in the area. We brought the issue to the bargaining table in 2006 and we are embarking on a detailed consideration of the issue with the union in the context of the Safety and Health Advisory Committee.”

When that happens, the thickening of the bat handle seems the likeliest compromise. Sherwood said the study showed that as the size of the handle increases, the potential for broken bats decreases. Players might object to thicker handles because they add weight, and every 10th of an ounce counts.

An outright ban is unlikely to muster union support, and it would be a logistical nightmare: Schupp said Hillerich & Bradsby would need at least 18 months to fill the orders of ash bats for all their clients.

Though, as one union source noted, after long struggles the players agreed to add earflaps onto helmets and ban amphetamines. If MLB is insistent enough, and perhaps willing to sacrifice something in return, the players might agree to forgo maple.

“I do not anticipate players will jump up and down and say, ‘You can take our bats away right away,’ ” the union source said. “If that’s backlash, I do expect some, yeah. Players may say, ‘Aren’t there other things you can do first?’ ”

Yes, though sources said MLB, while not sold on an outright ban, will push for one. The day after Long was hit, officials received video of the McLouth at-bat from multiple angles. One particularly gruesome shot came from a field-level camera pointed toward the dugout.

That afternoon, MLB officials contacted the union to set up a meeting to discuss maple bats.

All last season, Jorge Posada encouraged New York Yankees teammate Doug Mientkiewicz to switch from maple to ash. Mientkiewicz was tired of his bats breaking.

“They blow up constantly,” said Mientkiewicz, a first baseman now with the Pirates.

He had seen his bats shatter and heard stories, like the one where Eric Byrnes, angry after a bad at-bat, slammed his maple into the ground and saw its shrapnel hit catcher Miguel Olivo in the head.

Outspoken voices are beginning to emerge. Pirates manager John Russell and Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon have called them “dangerous,” and Mientkiewicz said it was “amazing” that one hasn’t struck and injured a player.

“It’s going to take somebody getting severely hurt to think about a change,” Mientkiewicz said. “Anybody who thinks I’m overreacting should go look at our hitting coach’s face. It was spooky. It was really spooky.”

Doctors predict the nerves in Long’s face will regenerate and he’ll be able to smile again. He’s not calling for an outright ban on maple, either, because he understands how particular and superstitious players can be.

Look at McLouth. A 26-year-old who hadn’t finished a season with more than 329 at-bats, he ranks fourth in the National League in slugging percentage and is on target to make his first All-Star appearance.

No one would blame him for not changing his underwear, let alone the tool he uses to get his hits.

“I’m thinking about maybe trying ash again,” said McLouth, sitting in the clubhouse at Nationals Park last week, holding his maple bat, flexing his wrists, taking quarter swings. “I mean, just thinking about it. Because I swear, ever since I broke the bat that day in Dodger Stadium, it seems like, as a team, we’ve broken three or four bats a day.”

That afternoon, against the Nationals, on the third pitch of the game, McLouth’s bat split. The bat boy ran out to retrieve the refuse, returned from the dugout with a new one and handed it to McLouth, who walked back to home plate with his weapon of choice.